tihvavy  of  Che  Cheolo^icd  ^tmxmvy 

PRINCETON  •  NEW  JERSEY 
PRESENTED  BY 

The  I::Ftate   of   the 
Rev.   John  B.   V/iedinsf-er 

E^-«  :^-L^ 

BS  2665  .H89 

Hutton,  John  Alexander,  isl 
-1947.  j 
If  God  be  for  us          ^ 


If  God  be  for  Us 


IF  GOD  BE  FOR 


BY  THE   REVEREND 

JOHN    A.    HUTTON,  M.A. 


HODDER    AND    STOUGHTON 
NEW  YORK   AND  LONDON 


To 

MY  SISTER  AGNES 

Mrs.  Carroll  Neidb  Brown 


Printed  in  1913 


Chapter  I 


"  What  shall  we  say  to  these  things  ?    K  God  be  for 
us,  who  is  against  us?  " 


Chapter  I 


The  task  which  I  propose  to  myself  in 
this  and  a  few  subsequent  studies  is  to 
make  clear  to  my  own  mind,  and  to 
enter  with  sympathy  and  understanding, 
the  world  of  ideas,  of  beliefs,  of  fears,  of 
protests,  which  lies  behind  that  pas- 
sionate and  militant  passage  at  the  close 
of  our  eighth  chapter  of  St,  Paul's  letter 
to  the  Romans. 

It  is  one  of  those  great  passages — the 
fortieth  chapter  of  Isaiah  is  another 
— which,  by  virtue  of  their  spaciousness 
and  exaltation,  their  simplicity  and  their 
ultimateness,  rise  like  peaks  out  of  a 
tumult  of  mountains — final  ventures  of 
the  human  spirit  into  the  region  of  ab- 
solute truth.  They  are  truly  eloquent 
words,  entirely  free,  indeed,  from  the 
affectation  and  self-consciousness  of  the 
lower  eloquence.     They  stagger  with  the 

3 


If  God  be  for  Us 


burden  of  reality,  yet  glow  and  leap  with 
a  passion  which  I  do  not  know  how  to 
define  except  to  say  that  it  rests  upon  a 
kind  of  terror  if  it  should  all  prove 
untrue. 

I  think  that  is  a  note  of  all  really  moving 
speech.  We  feel  as  we  listen  that  the 
whole  of  our  life  is  being  concentrated 
into  one  hope,  one  interest,  one  point 
of  view.  One  thing  after  another  we 
leave  behind.  One  thing  after  another, 
in  the  triumph  of  our  spirits,  we  feel  that 
we  can  dispense  with  and  even  despise. 
Thus  we  rise  and  rise  into  an  intense 
solitude,  above  thought,  though  still 
thinking,  knowing  only  that  it  is  well 
with  our  soul,  that  this  is  life  and  truth 
and  reality  :  and  what  makes  the  poig- 
nancy of  the  experience  is  that  now  we 
have  gone  so  far  that  we  cannot  come 
back.  We  must  find  some  resting-place, 
some  justification  for  our  journey.  We  are 
like  swimmers  who  have  gone  too  far 
into  the  depths  to  return,  who  must 
go  on  now  towards  the  other  shore  :    or 

4 


If  God  be  for  Us 


like  the  dove  from  Noah's  ark,  which 
must  find  a  place  to  rest  itself  out  of  the 
vortex  of  the  dark  floods.  And  blessed 
indeed  are  they  whose  lonely  minds, 
voyaging  through  the  Infinite,  find,  like 
that  dove,  a  leaf — some  token  of  God 
from  that  world  of  realities — ^which  they 
may  bear  back  with  them  into  the  world 
of  their  daily  experience. 

As  we  yield  ourselves  up  to  the  passion 
of  such  words  and  ideas  as  are  in  this 
eighth  chapter  of  Romans,  we  arrive  at 
some  such  promontory  in  the  Spirit- world. 
We  feel  that  this  is  truth,  or  there  is  no 
such  thing  as  truth  for  man. 

Now,  it  might  be  said  that  such  a 
passage  as  this  with  which  the  eighth 
chapter  of  Romans  concludes,  simply 
because  it  is  so  eloquent  and  rhetorical, 
is  unsuitable  for  purposes  of  exposition  : 
that  we  must  not  apply  to  the  inter- 
pretation of  words  a  spirit  different  from 
that  in  which  they  were  conceived  :  that 
to  apply  the  critical  reason  to  words 
which  evidently    broke  from    St.    Paul's 

5 


If  God  be  for  Us 


soul  in  a  torrent   is  as  incongruous  as  it 
would  be  to  measure  light  with  a  foot- 
rule,    or    to    interrupt    the    influence    of 
music  by  speaking  in  an  arid  way  of  the 
mechanics  of  sound.     It  takes  a  poet  to 
estimate  poetry  :    and  when  we  do  estim- 
ate poetry,   it  is   by  virtue   of  the  poet 
who  still  survives  within  each  one  of  us. 
The    objection    is    a    sound    one,   and 
ought  to  be  attended  to  by  many.      But 
it  does  not  apply  to  the  intention  which 
is  in  my  own  mind.     It  is  perfectly  true 
that  an  outpouring  like  this,  which  begins 
with    "  Who    shall    separate    us  ?  " — an 
outpouring    which    is,    by    every    token, 
spontaneous  and  passionate,  is  not  to  be 
subjected  to  any  cold  or  formal  inquiry. 
I  do  not  propose  to  consider  the  passage 
coldly,    and    as    a    thing    which    may    or 
may  not  be  true.     I  wish,  not  to  consider 
the  words  at  all,  but  rather  to  feel  their 
rush   and   volume,   to   rebuke   myself   all 
the  time  that  there  is  so  little  in  my  own 
life  comparable  to  this  passion  and  con- 
fidence :    to  envy  this  man,  the  depths  of 

6 


If  God  be  for  Us 


whose  life  rested  so  securely  upon  God. 
I  wish  rather  to  feel  the  greatness  of  his 
soul. 

It  is  quite  true  also  that  in  the  case 
of  some  kinds  of  so-called  eloquence  a 
writer  or  speaker,  far  from  giving  any 
indication  of  his  true  personality,  dis- 
guises and  conceals  himself.  Words  and 
gestures  may  be  assumed  for  the  occasion, 
and  with  a  view  to  effect.  In  this  they 
may  even  succeed,  but  it  is  a  poor  success. 
The  speaker  or  writer  has  approved  him- 
self as  a  good  tradesman  in  his  particular 
craft,  but  he  has  not  unveiled  the  face 
of  truth. 

In  a  moment  of  true  eloquence,  on  the 
other  hand,  a  writer  or  a  speaker  permits 
those  who  have  ears  to  hear  to  detect  the 
very  stuff  and  substance  of  his  soul.  As 
you  listen,  there  may  be  a  thousand 
things  which  still  are  unknown  to  you 
concerning  this  one  who  is  swaying  your 
spirit.  But  what  he  is  essentially,  you 
do  know.  What  this  life  means  to  him, 
you  do  know.     How,  in  the  last  solitude 

7 


If  God  be  for  Us 


of  his  personal  life,  his  spirit  behaves  and 
tends,  you  do  know.  For  in  a  moment 
of  great  and  moving  speech  a  man's 
ultimate  nature  is  disclosed.  All  his 
knowledge,  all  his  experience,  is  caught 
up  in  a  flame  and  melted,  and  if  it  must 
pour  out,  it  will  pour  out  by  the  way 
of  the  man's  dearest  and  final  concern. 

There  is  no  hour  or  moment  when 
we  are  so  true  to  ourselves,  and  when  we 
give  so  much  of  ourselves  to  the  world, 
as  that  hour  or  moment  when  some 
sentiment  which  has  been  smouldering  for 
years  or  for  days  beneath  the  surface  of 
our  life,  having  been  brooded  upon  anew, 
at  length  tears  open  a  way  of  utter- 
ance. In  such  a  moment  we  give  our- 
selves away.  We  no  longer  live,  but  the 
truth,  as  we  perceive  it,  lives  in  us.  What 
happens  when  we  are  moved  by  great 
speech  is  not  that  we  are  listening  as  to 
one  who  plays  skilfully  upon  a  harp  :  no  ; 
what  happens  is  that  we  are  seeing, 
though  in  a  glass  darkly,  some  aspect 
of  the  Face  of  God  ! 

8 


If  God  be  for  Us 


To  those  who  understand  these  things, 
to  approach  a  passage  hke  this,  in  which 
the  final  things  in  a  man's  soul  betray 
themselves,  will  be  felt  to  be  one  of 
those  tasks  which  require  from  us  a 
reverent  and  susceptible  spirit. 

To  see  the  soul  in  any  moment  of 
reality,  to  look  upon  the  soul  engaged  in 
a  struggle  with  some  elementary  thing, 
like  misfortune,  or  moral  fear,  or  death 
— ^is  to  occupy  for  the  moment  ground 
whereon  a  man  should  take  off  his  shoes, 
for  it  is  holy.  At  such  a  moment,  when 
we  see  the  human  spirit  in  its  nakedness, 
we  are  approaching  as  near  as  it  is  possible 
for  us,  to  the  holy  of  holies  where  God  is. 

To  put  the  matter  in  another  light,  I 
should  like  in  these  studies  to  ask  our- 
selves :  What  is  it  that  lies  behind  this 
glowing  passage  ?  What  ideas  ?  What 
view  of  the  world  is  the  Apostle  con- 
tending for  ?  What  view  of  the  world  is 
he  contending  against  ?  St.  Paul  claimed 
that  in  preaching  he  did  not  simply  beat 

9 


If  God  be  for  Us 


the  air — meaning,  I  suppose,  that  he  did 
not  deal   with  abstractions   and  unreaH- 
ties,  that  in  his   preaching  he  was  moving 
amongst  the  actual  and  pressing  concerns 
of  man.     We  may  well  believe  that  he  was 
no  less  real  and  definite  and  concrete  in 
an  epistle,  and  in  such  a  considered  and 
careful   epistle    as  this  to   the    Romans. 
Besides,  it   was   not   about   nothing,   nor 
was   it   about    things  indifferent,    that   a 
mind  like   St.  Paul's  would  take  fire,  as 
it    does    here.     I    spoke    of    this    great 
passage    as    a    glowing    one  :     and    that 
indeed  describes  it.      For  a  glow  is  pro- 
duced,   not   when   you   bring   a   light   to 
some     flimsy    material — ^then    you    have 
simply  a  flame,  and  next  moment  black- 
ness, the  surrounding  atmosphere  in  no 
wise  warmed,  and  your  own  spirit  some- 
what depressed  by  the  momentary  illu- 
sion.    A  glow  such  as  you  have  in  this 
great   passage   comes   when   the   element 
of    fire    has    encountered    an    obstinate 
hostility,  when  for  a  time  the  two  struggle 
-r-the  material  mass  and  the  challenging 
10 


If  God  be  for  Us 


heat,  the  one  putting  forth  all  its  energy 
and  summoning  all  its  reserves  in  order 
to  destroy  the  other  :  the  fire  steadily 
winning  the  day,  first  with  the  evidence 
of  smoke,  then  with  the  outburst  of  little 
flames,  then  with  the  final  triumph  when 
the  very  material  which  at  first  resisted 
can  resist  no  more,  and  yields  itself  up 
handsomely,  contributing  to  the  warmth 
and  brilliance  and  comfort. 

So  here  :  they  are  no  indifferent  mat- 
ters that  St.  Paul  is  contending  against, 
in  these  determined  and  passionate  words. 
Death,  life,  angels,  principalities,  things 
present,  things  to  come,  powers,  height, 
depth — we  feel  from  the  very  strength  and 
desperateness  of  his  protest  that  in  each 
word  he  is  grappling  with  some  powerful 
enemy  and  contradiction  of  his  faith  in 
Christ. 

Let  that  metaphor  from  the  nature 
of  a  glowing  fire,  viz.  that  the  burning 
and  glow  arise  from  the  conflict  of  flame 
and  opposing  things — let  that  metaphor 
decide  our  way  of  approach.     Let  us  ask  : 

11 


If  God  be  for  Us 


What  lies  behind  St.  Paul  and  on  his  side, 
and  what  lies  behind  those  opposing 
things,  in  this  precise  clash  and  conflict 
of  ideas  and  powers  and  points  of  view  ? 
St.  Paul  himself,  and  on  such  a  matter 
he  alone  is  qualified  to  give  evidence,  has 
told  us  that  one  day  something  happened 
to  him  which  made  an  entire  break  in  his 
life.  Jesus  Christ  appeared  to  him  out- 
side the  gate  of  Damascus.  The  whole 
of  the  Apostle's  subsequent  life  took  its 
direction  from  that  experience.  It  simply 
meant  everything  to  him.  Instead  of 
the  influence  of  it  wearing  off,  as  happens 
in  the  case  of  many  an  exalted  mood,  it 
went  on  deepening  and  broadening  until 
he  could  say — and  he  did  not  need  to 
say  it  to  convince  us  :  for  we  can  see  that 
it  was  so — "  that  he  no  longer  lived,  but 
Christ  lived  in  him."  From  that  day  he 
believed  in  Jesus  Christ  as  the  Lord 
from  heaven,  and  loved  Him,  and  lived 
to  bring  others  into  the  blessedness  of 
his  own  condition — ^^vith  a  fidelity  and 
passion  and  patience  which  fills  us  all 
12 


If  God  be  for  Us 


with  wonder  and  shame.  He  affects  us 
as  never  having  thought  about  anything 
else  but  Christ  all  the  days  of  his  life. 
He  became — what  we  might  call  him, 
and  what  he  on  one  occasion  comes  near 
to  calling  himself — an  abandoned  servant 
of  Christ. 

There  are  passages  in  which  he  sets 
aside  his  habitual  reticence  and  allows 
us  to  see  for  a  moment  what  the  manner 
of  his  life  was.  "  Are  they  ministers  of 
Christ  ?  (I  speak  as  one  beside  myself) 
I  more ;  in  labours  more  abundantly, 
in  prisons  more  abundantly,  in  stripes 
above  measure,  in  deaths  oft.  Of  the 
Jews  five  times  received  I  forty  stripes 
save  one.  Thrice  was  I  beaten  with 
rods,  once  was  I  stoned,  thrice  I  suffered 
shipwreck,  a  night  and  a  day  have  I  been 
in  the  deep  ;  in  journey ings  often,  in 
perils  of  rivers,  in  perils  of  robbers,  in 
perils  from  my  countrymen,  in  perils 
from  the  Gentiles,  in  perils  in  the  city,  in 
perils  in  the  wilderness,  in  perils  in  the 
sea,  in  perils  among  false  brethren  ;    in 

13 


If  God  be  for  Us 


labour  and  travail,  in  watchings  often, 
in  hunger  and  thirst,  in  fastings  often,  in 
cold  and  nakedness."  And  so  on,  until 
in  our  secret  hearts  we  cry,  "  Lord,  have 
mercy  upon  us." 

Nor  did  he  find  it  a  hard  and  sad  thing 
to  live  on  this  plane  of  unrelieved  conse- 
cration. He  had  his  own  dark  hours. 
But  he  never  once  looked  back.  He 
envied  no  one.  Great  as  were  his  suffer- 
ings, they  were  always  less  than  his  joy. 
All  this  had  its  source  and  fountain  in 
that  experience  outside  Damascus  when 
he  saw  a  light  from  heaven  and  heard 
the  voice  of  Jesus  calling  him  by  name. 

We  know  how  any  deep  experience 
affects  our  view  of  God  and  the  world. 
It  will  depend  upon  many  things  whether 
our  experience  at  the  hands  of  life  will 
affect  us  very  seriously  and  whether  it 
will  affect  us  for  long.  Our  Lord  pre- 
pared us  for  finding  people  whose  natures 
were  of  such  a  kind  that  good  impres- 
sions, the  vision  of  God  even,  would 
soon  pass  away,  losing  themselves  in  the 
14 


If  God  be  for  Us 


general  interest  of  the  world  or  in  any 
later  excitement.  But  He  assured  us 
at  the  same  time  that  there  were  natures 
of  a  nobler  order,  natures  which  would 
receive  the  vision  of  God  with  their 
whole  heart  and  mind,  and  within  these 
it  would  germinate,  living  on  the  very 
substance  of  such  souls  and  transmuting 
them  to  its  own  spirit.  Saul  of  Tarsus 
was  a  man  of  this  order,  his  life  being 
witness. 

But,  to  dwell  upon  this  point  for  a 
moment,  any  deep  experience  at  the 
hands  of  life  has  the  effect  of  casting  over 
the  whole  world  for  us  its  own  light  or 
its  own  gloom.  We  cannot  but  see  all 
things  from  the  standpoint  of  that  ex- 
perience. Love  comes  to  us,  and  as  we 
open  the  door  it  is  not  love  only  that 
we  see  :  we  see  a  love-lit  world,  a  world 
which  dwells  in  God,  "  with  the  sunshine 
and  the  swallows  and  the  flowers."  And 
though  to  those  who  love,  severe  days 
will  come,  and  even  because  of  their  love 
severe  days  are  sure  to  come,  they  will 

15 


If  God  be  for  Us 


be  churlish  hearts  indeed  who,  when  the 
clouds  assemble,  begin  to  speak  foolishly 
concerning  God,  as  though  clouds  were 
the  abiding  element,  forgetting  the  day 
when  the  sky  was  blue  for  them. 

But  it  is  not  love  only  which,  coming 
to  a  human  heart,  has  the  power  to 
make  new  heavens  and  a  new  earth. 
Any  great  emotion  which  is  fortunate 
enough  to  take  hold  of  us,  when  for 
certain  reasons  we  are  ready  to  enter  a 
new  allegiance,  may  have  the  same  great 
power. 

We  may  one  day  see  the  pinched  face 
of  a  hungry  child — and  that  may  be  for 
us  the  call  of  God  summoning  us  to  a 
crusade.  Or  we  may  read  a  book  where 
some  social  shame  is  stripped  of  its  dis- 
guise, and  by  the  power  of  art  heightened 
in  its  cruelty  and  pervasiveness ;  and 
that  reading  may  under  God  save  our 
own  soul  as  by  fire,  and  rally  us  to  the 
depth  of  our  being,  to  the  side  of  purity 
against  the  squalor  of  the  world.  It  is 
what  we  see,  in  some  hour  of  personal 
16 


If  God  be  for  Us 


tension,  which  decides  what  we  shall  see 
for  many  a  day  :  and  there  are  visions  of 
such  a  kind  that  never  afterwards  can  a 
man  look  out  upon  life  except  from  their 
standpoint.  Saul  of  Tarsus  saw  Jesus 
Christ  risen  from  the  dead.  That  gave 
him  his  world.     He  saw  : 

that  Face 
**  Which  far  from  vanish  rather  grows, 
And  decomposes  but  to  recompose, 
Becomes  my  universe  and  feels  and  knows." 

Now,  the  vision  of  God  in  Christ  when 
it  comes  to  a  man  does  not  come,  so  to 
speak,  into  an  empty  room,  nor  do  its 
operations  and  effects  occur  in  a  swept 
and  empty  place.  It  is  to  a  man  that  the 
vision  comes  :  to  a  wonderful  nexus  of 
ancestral  inheritances  and  racial  preju- 
dices, to  a  tumult  of  impressions,  things 
learned,  things  seen,  things  done,  and 
the  effects  and  reactions  of  all  these ;  to  a 
being  with  his  memories,  his  hopes,  his 
faith,  his  fear,  and  some  predominant 
temperament  or  bias.  And  what  the 
vision  of  God  in  Christ  does  is  not  to 
c  17 


If  God  be  for  Us 


destroy  these  ;  but  to  compel  them  to 
take  their  places  in  a  new  life-system  in 
which  the  vision  of  God  in  Christ  is  now 
supreme. 

At  the  outset  it  may  seem  as  if  the 
vision  of  Christ  emptied  our  life  of  all  its 
former  occupants,  all  our  natural  ten- 
dencies, all  the  results  of  our  learning,  all 
our  earlier  experience  of  the  world.  At 
the  outset  there  seems  to  be  nothing  but 
Christ  and  our  own  direct  response  to 
Him.  It  is  a  time  of  something  like  the 
bridal  joy  or  the  dawn  of  love,  when  we 
have  only  each  other ;  and  the  world 
of  facts  and  circumstances  has  no  reality 
for  us.  And  God  permits  us  such  a  time. 
But  it  is  no  disparagement  of  love,  and 
no  aspersion  on  its  divine  truth  and 
quahty,  to  say  that  this  purely  lyrical 
time  passes,  and  ought  to  pass.  Then 
come  the  days  when  our  love  is  deepened 
and  moralised  by  duty,  by  responsibility, 
by  absences  that  make  the  heart  fonder, 
by  the  memory  of  struggles  endured,  of 
difficulties  overcome.  It  may  be  that 
18 


If  God  be  for  Us 


every  high  emotion  is  destined  to  pass 
from  poetry  into  prose,  from  ecstasy  to 
duty,  from  music  to  the  engaging  of  an 
enemy  :  but  there  is  a  noble  prose  ;  there 
is  the  prose  of  a  Milton,  where  you  have 
a  soul  moving  still  in  an  atmosphere  of 
poetry,  of  lofty  ideas  and  hopes,  with  a 
background  in  God,  and  contending  in 
this  actual  world  of  conflicting  things  for 
the  embarrassed  soul  of  man. 

When  Jesus  Christ  appeared  to  Saul  of 
Tarsus  outside  the  gate  of  Damascus,  it 
was  to  the  man  Saul  that  He  appeared. 
It  was  to  a  man  with  Saul's  racial  and 
personal  qualities.  It  was  to  the  pupil 
of  Gamaliel.  It  was  to  a  Pharisee  who 
was  the  child  of  Pharisees.  It  was  to 
an  able  and  serious  man.  It  was  to  one 
who  by  nature,  i.e.  by  the  calling  and 
election  of  God,  was  a  religious  man : 
one  who  demanded  of  life  that  it  should 
mean  something,  and  that  it  should  mean 
something  of  such  a  kind  that  a  man  is 
saved  or  he  is  lost  according  as  he  devotes 
himself  to  that  something  or  neglects  it. 

19 


If  God  be  for  Us 


And  above  all,  it  was  to  one  who  had 
conceived  it  to  be  his  duty  to  God  to 
blot  out  from  the  mind  of  mankind  the 
pretensions  of  Christ,  that  this  very- 
Christ  appeared,  bearing  evidences  for 
Paul  no  longer  to  be  questioned  that  He 
was  the  Lord  from  heaven. 

We  read  that  the  vision  felled  him  to 
the  ground  and  struck  him  blind.  The 
voice  in  which,  out  of  his  overthrow,  he 
whispers,  "  Lord,  what  wilt  Thou  have 
me  to  do  ?  "  is  the  voice  of  one  in  whom 
that  great  thing  has  happened  which 
must  happen  and  which  is  of  such  a  kind 
that  until  it  happens,  somehow,  we  are 
none  of  us  soft  enough  and  suppliant 
enough  and  lonely  enough  to  pass  through 
the  narrow  gate  ! 

But  it  is  no  part  of  God's  design  to 
arrest  or  annihilate  the  personality  of  a 
man.  Personality  in  its  pure  idea  is  the 
work  and  emanation  of  God  Himself. 
We  must  believe  that  God  called  us 
severally  into  being  because  He  saw  no 
other  way.  It  had  taken  all  history  up 
20 


If  God  be  for  Us 


to  that  hour  to  make  a  Saul  of  Tarsus 
possible.  It  had  taken  Genesis  and  Exo- 
dus, and  the  Exile  and  the  Psalms;  it 
had  taken  the  whole  episode  of  Philip 
of  Macedon  and  Alexander  the  Great ;  it 
had  taken  the  history  of  Imperial  Rome 
up  to  the  time  of  Augustus — to  make  this 
Saul  of  Tarsus,  with  his  knowledge  of 
Hebrew  and  his  knowledge  of  Greek,  and 
his  agony  concerning  God,  all  fermenting 
in  his  blood,  and  it  was  no  part  of  God's 
will  that  Christ's  intervention  should 
annihilate  that  costly  piece  of  work. 

Saul  rose  from  the  earth  with  a  terrible 
silence  in  his  soul :  a  silence  like  the 
silence  of  an  impeded  flood  just  before 
it  finds  its  way.  He  arose  from  the 
earth  and  was  led  by  the  hand  into 
Damascus.  For  three  days  he  sat  there 
in  silence,  in  the  darkness  of  total  blind- 
ness also  ;  and  we  read  that  for  those 
three  days  he  neither  ate  nor  drank. 
What  went  on  within  the  soul  of  Paul 
during  those  three  days  we  do  not  know. 
But   we   can   imagine.     In   the   light   of 

21 


If  God  be  for  Us 


all  that  he  became,  we  can  be  almost 
sure.  A  man  can  think  a  great  deal  in 
three  days :  especially  if  he  be  quite 
alone  and  if  he  is  suffering — ^without 
physical  pain. 

At  the  end  of  three  days  God  sent  a 
good  man  to  open  his  eyes.  In  God's 
view,  that  is  to  say,  Paul  was  ready  to 
take  the  road  again.  In  the  book  of 
the  Acts  we  are  told  that  as  soon  as 
his  eyes  were  opened,  Paul  preached  in 
Damascus  that  Jesus  is  the  Christ.  In 
the  Epistle  to  the  Galatians,  Paul  rather 
seems  to  say  that  as  soon  as  his  eyes 
were  opened,  he  went  away  into  the 
desert  of  Arabia.  I  don't  think  there 
is  any  contradiction :  and  I  have  no 
patience  with  people  who  make  a  great 
deal  about  such  discrepancies,  when  what 
we  are  dealing  with  is  the  agony  of  a  human 
soul  on  its  way  towards  God. 

What  I  suppose  really  happened  was 
that  Paul,  after  his  eyes  were  opened  and 
he  was  calm  enough  to  speak  about  him- 
self, confessed  at  once,  there  and  then  in 
22 


If  God  be  for  Us 


Damascus,  that  Jesus  is  the  Son  of  God. 
That  he  knew.  At  that  stage  perhaps  it 
was  the  one  thing  he  did  know  :  that 
Jesus,  Jesus  of  Nazareth,  whom  I  beheve 
Paul  had  known  in  the  flesh,  whose 
death  it  is  most  probable  he  had  witnessed 
— that  that  Jesus  was  and  had  all  the 
time  been  the  Son  and  Gift  of  God  to  this 
world,  which  in  its  blindness  and  in  the 
perverseness  of  its  religious  prejudice 
had  nailed  Him  to  a  felon's  cross.  Paul 
knew  that,  and  there  and  then  he  said  it. 
So  far  that  was  all  he  knew.  Then,  I 
take  it,  what  happened  was  that  the 
fight,  properly  speaking,  began  within 
Paul,  when,  after  the  onslaught  of  the 
Risen  Lord,  the  man  within  him  rallied, 
and  Christ,  who  was  well  set  in  the 
citadel  of  his  life,  issued  out  to  subdue 
and  transform  the  outlying  provinces. 

For  Paul  was  one  of  those  who  must 
be  unanimous,  one  of  those  who  cannot 
endure  to  live  on  what  I  have  often  called 
the  principle  of  bulkheads:  one  com- 
partment of  their  life  devoted  to  faith, 


If  God  be  for  Us 


another  devoted  to   thought,  another  to 
things — ^with    no    mutual   intercourse    or 
control,  each  paramount  within  its  own 
sphere    but    no    one    of    them    supreme. 
Paul  was  one  of  those  ultimately  sincere 
men  to  whom  life  must  be  one,  since  God 
is  One.     And  so,  I  take  it,  Paul  asked 
to   be   allowed    to   go   away   by   himself 
for  a  time  in  order  to  think  about  things, 
to  bring  things  together  again  in  some 
new  and  organic  system.     Especially  to 
think    how    his    whole    life    had    broken 
down  under  him,  and  how  he  must  rebuild 
it — ^its  philosophy,  its  reading  of  history, 
its  daily  practice — Jesus  Christ  Himself 
being  chief  corner-stone,  in  whom  each 
several    building    (or    compartment,    we 
might  say),  fitly  framed  together,  should 
grow  into  a  living  temple  in  the  Lord,  for 
the  habitation  of  God. 


24 


Chapter   II 


"But  when  it  was  the  good  pleasure  of  God,  who 
separated  me,  even  from  my  mother's  womb,  and  called 
me  through  His  grace,  to  reveal  His  Son  in  me,  that 
I  might  preach  Him  among  the  Gentiles ;  straightway 
I  conferred  not  with  flesh  and  blood  :  neither  went  I 
up  to  Jerusalem  to  them  that  were  apostles  before  me  : 
but  I  went  away  into  Arabia." — OaU  i.  16-17. 


Chapter  II 


A  GREAT  experience  condemns  a  man  to 
the  task  of  reconstructing  in  his  thought 
and  imagination  the  world  in  which  that 
experience  took  place.  In  a  great  experi- 
ence a  man  has  come  upon  a  new  order 
of  realities,  and  he  must  find  room  for 
those  realities.  Henceforward  he  must 
see  life  and  all  things  under  the  aspect  of 
that  experience  which  has  now  become 
for  him  the  heart  of  all  reality,  it  may 
even  be,  his  one  indisputable  fact.  Hence- 
forward all  his  earlier  facts,  all  his  habi- 
tual ways  of  considering  life,  all  the 
incidents,  all  the  ideas,  all  the  beliefs 
which  went  to  the  making  of  him,  range 
themselves  into  two  companies  or  forces. 
On  the  one  side  are  gathered  those  things 
which  seem  now  to  have  been  leading 
up  to  the  hour  of  his  great  experience, 
or  which   seem   now   to   corroborate   his 

27 


If  God  be  for  Us 


great  experience — these  on  the  one  hand  ; 
and  on  the  other  the  things  which  seem 
now,  looking  back,  to  have  been  all  along 
in  conflict  with  that  experience,  or  to  be 
now  most  manifestly  in  conflict  with  it. 

Paul's  one  indisputable  fact,  the  one 
experience  which  for  its  depth  and 
authenticity  had  for  the  time  reduced 
all  other  facts  to  insignificance,  was  this  : 
that  on  the  way  to  Damascus,  Jesus  of 
Nazareth,  as  Lord  and  Risen  from  the 
dead,  had  appeared  to  him  and  sum- 
moned him  by  name.  That  was  the  one 
thing  he  knew  :  and  henceforth,  so  long 
as  he  maintained  his  living  contact  with 
that  experience,  all  his  interests,  habits  of 
mind,  prejudices,  beliefs,  hopes,  fears — 
his  entire  life-system  must  be  co-ordinated 
and  organised  round  that  central  point  of 
light. 

It  was  a  very  deep  instinct  which  led 
this  man,  as  soon  as  he  had  recovered 
from  the  bewilderment  of  this  crisis,  to 
go  away  by  himself  to  think  about  it 
and  to  think  about  everything.  To  think 
28 


If  God  be  for  Us 


about  it,  not  with  the  view  of  under- 
mining its  authority,  but  with  the  view  of 
doing  it  honour  and  giving  it  its  place 
at  the  centre  of  his  life,  henceforth  to 
dominate  everything. 

As  our  Lord,  after  the  descent  of  the 
Holy  Spirit  upon  Him  at  the  Jordan, 
hurried  away  into  the  desert, — to  think 
about  all  that  was  involved  :  to  face  in 
solitude  the  life  which  the  summons  of 
the  Eternal  Spirit  had  imposed,  to  esti- 
mate the  cost  and  to  assure  Himself  of  His 
Resources  in  God  ;  so  His  servant,  Paul, 
went  away  by  himself  into  a  solitude 
which  would  permit  and  encourage  this 
great  Experience  to  unfold  all  its  implica- 
tions. Three  years  later,  he  tells  us,  he 
returned  and  went  up  to  Jerusalem,  and 
conferred  with  the  older  Apostles,  not  as 
one  who  was  inferior  to  them  in  the  mystery 
of  Christ,  but  as  one  who  also  had  seen 
Christ  face  to  face  in  solitude  and  agony 
and  peace. 

And  now,  let  us  think,  with  as  much 
29 


If  God  be  for  Us 


simplicity  as  we  may,  of  the  truth  about 
God  which  this  Revelation  of  Jesus  as 
Lord  would  bring  to  Paul — the  truth 
which  for  ever  afterwards  formed  the 
basis  and  motive  of  his  life,  the  Rock  of 
Confidence  against  which  the  waves  of  a 
contradicting  world  dashed  and  hissed 
in  vain.  And  such  an  inquiry  is  most 
relevant  to  any  deep  study  of  this  great 
passage  in  "  Romans."  We  cannot  read 
that  passage  or  hear  it  read  without  feeling 
that  the  Apostle  is  fighting  over  again  an 
old  battle,  though  now  in  a  more  radiant 
mood,  with  years  of  experience  of  Christ 
to  give  power  and  endurance  to  his  spirit. 
We  feel  that  once  again  waves  of  hostile 
things,  dark,  sinister  shapes  are  assailing 
the  last  convictions  of  his  soul,  and  that 
he  is  beating  them  back,  not  with  a 
weapon  hastily  forged  or  chosen  in  the 
very  moment  of  fear,  but  with  a  weapon, 
a  final  attitude  of  his  whole  being,  pre- 
pared long  beforehand,  and  found  trium- 
phant in  many  an  unrecorded  struggle. 
He  beats  back  those  sinister,  insinuating 
30 


If  God  be  for  Us 


foes — which  later  we  propose  to  discover 
in  their  more  modern  guise  under  such 
words  as  "  angels,  principalities,  powers, 
things  present,  things  to  come,  height, 
depth,  any  other  creature  " — he  beats  back 
those  sinister,  insinuating  foes,  not  by  any 
weapon  of  ingenuity,  but  simply  by  falling 
back  upon  one  great  truth,  upon  one  well- 
remembered  fact  and  experience ;  the 
truth  and  fact  and  experience  which  con- 
fronted him  on  the  way  to  Damascus  and 
which  he  wrought  into  the  very  fibres 
of  his  soul  during  those  silent  years  in 
Arabia. 

As  we  get  older,  life,  considered  ulti- 
mately, becomes  simpler.  If  God  is,  and 
if  God  is  according  to  Christ  Jesus,  then 
all  is  well  for  those  whose  lives  are  con- 
ducted on  the  basis  and  principles  of  such 
a  faith.  If  God  is  the  Father  of  our  Lord 
and  Saviour,  Jesus  Christ,  then  there 
may  be  a  thousand  things  still  mysterious 
and  beyond  our  power  to  comprehend  or 
imagine,  but  we  have  at  least  a  way  of 
looking  at  our  life  which  enables  us  to 


If  God  be  for  Us 


stand  up  to  the  contradictions  of  experi- 
ence and  to  meet  the  affront  of  death. 

Speaking  for  myself,  I  find  it  more 
helpful  and  sustaining  to  put  the  ultimate 
question  of  our  faith  thus,  and  to  ask, 
"  Is  God  indeed  the  Father  of  our  Lord 
and  Saviour,  Jesus  Christ  ?  "  than  to  ask, 
*'  Is  Jesus  Christ  the  Son  of  God  ?  "  The 
question  is  the  same  ;  but,  speaking  for 
myself,  I  tend  more  and  more  to  come 
to  God  through  Christ,  than  to  come  to 
Christ  through  God.  I  tend  more  and 
more  to  clothe  God  with  the  qualities  and 
attributes  of  Christ,  than  to  clothe  Christ 
with  the  qualities  and  attributes  of  Deity. 
And  I  venture  to  think  that  this  is  nearer 
to  the  theological  method  of  the  New 
Testament,  and  nearer  to  what  is  the 
behaviour  and  instinct  of  our  soul  in 
prayer  and  in  any  time  of  spiritual  dis- 
tress. 

The  God  in  whom  we  Christians  believe 
is  not  merely  a  nexus  of  categories,  such 
as  omnipotence,  omniscience,  unchange- 
ableness,  and  the  rest.     The  God  in  whom 

32 


If  God  be  for  Us 


we  Christians  believe  is  the  God  and 
Father  of  our  Lord  and  Saviour  Jesus 
Christ.  To  use  the  very  language  of  the 
New  Testament,  "  we  believe  in  God 
through  Jesus  Christ  our  Lord."  Yes,  we 
might  go  all  the  length  and  say  we  believe 
in  God  for  the  sake  of  Jesus  Christ.  We 
believe  that  Christ  was  and  is  in  the  bosom 
of  God  from  all  eternity.  We  believe 
there  is  a  Cross  in  the  Godhead.  For  we 
believe  there  is  a  heart  in  the  Godhead, 
and  what  is  the  very  function  and  glory 
of  a  heart  except  that  it  will  break,  if  need 
be,  in  the  agony  of  its  love  ! 

What  I  want  to  be  assured  of — and  the 
whole  effort  of  Christ  is  to  assure  me — is 
that  the  Power  which  brought  all  things 
into  being  and  sustains  them — a  Power 
which  I  do  not  need  to  be  convinced  is 
Infinite,  is  a  Power  which  is  penetrated 
by  Christ.  I  want  to  be  assured  that 
Christ  is  the  constitution  of  the  Godhead. 
For  we  men  and  women  do  live  in  an 
isle  of  terror,  surrounded  by  spaces  before 
the  bare  idea  of  which  our  spirit  faints 
D  83 


If  God  be  for  Us 


and  grows  cold.  We  are  here  for  a  day 
and  are  gone.  And  soon  or  late,  it  all 
comes  to  be  too  strange,  too  weird,  too 
disheartening  :  until  Something  happens 
either  to  make  it  credible  to  me  that  Love 
may  be  as  infinite  as  Power,  and  more 
ancient  than  Power ;  or  so  to  win  my 
heart  to  a  holy  life  in  this  world  that  I 
shall  have  no  disabling  anxiety  concerning 
what  may  lie  beyond. 

Now  the  Presence  of  Christ  in  the  world 
is  for  me  that  persuading,  reassuring  thing. 
I  confront  the  misgivings  of  my  soul  with 
the  testimony,  the  faith,  and  experience 
of  Jesus.  I  know,  of  course,  that  here 
there  is  no  logical  necessity.  Christ  can- 
not coerce  me  into  believing  that  the 
Infinite  God  is  His  Father,  that  the  Heart 
which  beat  in  Jesus  beats  in  God.  But 
He  asks  me  to  believe  this.  Life  appeals 
to  me  to  believe  this.  The  signs  of  love 
in  the  world  keep  caUing  to  me  to  dis- 
regard the  contrary  signs.  And  behind 
everything,  at  the  end  of  all  my  thoughts 
and  despairs,  I  come  upon  this  Jesus  who 
34 


If  God  be  for  Us 


lived  in  this  Holy  Love,  whose  Soul  dwelt 
in  it,  whose  Face  shone  with  the  Hght  of 
it,  who  bore  up  through  life  on  the  hidden 
wings  of  it,  who  leaned  back  in  death  into 
the  arms  of  it — and  who  appeared  to  one 
here  and  there  of  those  who  knew  Him, 
in  the  unworldly  glory  of  it. 

Life,  which  is  the  contrivance  and 
hand  of  the  Eternal  Spirit,  Hfe  has  its  own 
way  of  discovering  to  each  of  us  the  nature 
of  reality  :  life  chose  its  own  way  of  dis- 
covering to  Paul  that  the  nature  of  reality 
is  Christ.  Like  a  beacon,  that  light  of  the 
knowledge  of  God  in  the  face  of  Jesus 
Christ  made  long  inroads  and  avenues  of 
light  backward,  forward,  upward,  down- 
ward, and  in  that  Hght  Paul's  spirit  abode, 
issuing  forth  and  returning  again  until  his 
day  was  done. 

Now,  the  thing  which  the  revelation  of 
Jesus  as  Lord  meant  above  everything 
else  to  Paul  was — to  put  it  in  a  phrase 
from  this  passage — that  God  is  for  us. 
In  a  sense,  of  course,  as  a  devout  Jew  he 
had  always  believed  that  God  stood  in  a 
35 


If  God  be  for  Us 


definite  relation  to  men.  In  a  sense,  too, 
as  later  on  he  saw,  the  prophets  and 
psalmists  had  conceived  of  God  in  warmer 
and  more  loving  terms  than  had  been  per- 
mitted by  the  Rabbinical  schools  of  his 
own  time  and  of  immediately  preceding 
times. 

But  it  was  to  Paul,  a  Pharisee  of  that 
day,  that  the  Risen  Christ  appeared. 

God  had  been  to  him  as  a  taskmaster 
overshadowing  his  private  life,  coming 
upon  him  suddenly  in  moments  of  un- 
worthiness.  The  most  that  even  a  good 
man  might  do  with  regard  to  God  was 
to  maintain  a  sleepless  vigilance  over  his 
own  behaviour,  occupying  himself  with 
appointed  ceremonial  acts  and  observ- 
ances. And  when  he  had  done  all  this, 
a  man  had  the  miserable  feeling  that  still 
he  had  fallen  short.  He  was  always,  as 
it  were,  on  his  trial  before  God,  and  in 
that  trial  always  stood  condemned. 

But  the  Revelation  of  the  Risen  Lord 
had  changed  all  that ;   and  it  is  the  great- 
ness of  Paul  that  he  grasped  what  was 
86 


If  God  be  for  Us 


involved  in  this  change  to  such  a  depth, 
and  with  such  clearness  of  vision  and  such 
hardihood  of  doctrine  and  practice  as 
under  God  to  have  effected  the  religious 
life  and  the  religious  philosophy  for  ever. 

Paul  saw  God  in  Christ — not  imputing 
unto  men  their  trespasses.  Henceforward, 
Paul  began  with  God.  He  saw  God 
freely  giving  His  Son  to  the  world,  not 
asking  first  whether  the  world  was  fit  to 
receive  Him.  Indeed,  he  saw,  and  this 
was  the  amazing  thing,  which,  as  he  pon- 
dered it,  brought  on  the  revolution  in 
his  faith, — ^he  saw  that  God  sent  His  Son 
into  the  world  not  because  the  world  was 
worthy  of  Him,  but  because  it  was  not 
worthy  of  Him.  "  God  commendeth  His 
love  to  us" — so  he  once  expressed  him- 
self— "  in  that  while  we  were  yet  sinners, 
Christ  died  for  us." 

God  was  not  to  be  conceived,  therefore, 
as  a  Power  seated  upon  a  throne  waiting 
for  something  to  happen :  He  was  a 
loving  Spirit,  urging  Himself  into  the 
hearts  of  men. 

37 


If  God  be  for  Us 


What,  then,  is  required  of  us  men  is  not 
that  we  shall  work  ourselves  up  to  some- 
thing, but  simply  that  we  shall  open  our 
hearts  to  One  who  is  there.  Goodness, 
then,  is  not  mere  correctness  :  it  is  com- 
munion,— communion  with  God,  the  pass- 
ing into  our  lives  of  the  supernatural  life 
of  Jesus. 

It  was  Paul's  ignorance  of  this  and  his 
neglect  of  it  that  had  led  to  all  his  rehgious 
misery.  He  had  been  like  a  man  cUmb- 
ing  a  mountain,  avoiding  chasms  and 
shuddering  under  beetling  masses  of  rock, 
in  order  to  reach  God  at  the  top.  Now 
he  could  begin  with  God  at  the  bottom. 
He  saw  clearly  now  that  sin  was  simply 
the  absence  of  the  Holy  Spirit,  and 
the  misery  of  sin  simply  the  absence 
of  faith  in  that  full  forgiveness  which 
Jesus  declared  and  which  Jesus  had 
bequeathed. 

From  time  to  time  it  has  been  alleged, 

and  attempts  have  been  made  to  prove  it, 

that  Paul  practically  introduced   a  new 

faith  ;    that  he  was  the  founder  of  a  new 

38 


If  God  be  for  Us 


religion,  which  in  its  characteristic  words 
and  ideas  is  different  from  the  rcHgion  of 
Jesus.  And  so  we  have  had  the  cry 
"  back  to  Christ,"  with  the  insinuation 
that  in  our  devotion  to  the  PauHne  inter- 
pretation of  Christ  we  had  departed  from 
the  pure  witness  to  God  of  Christ  Himself. 
Words  from  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount  are 
quoted,  and  these  are  contrasted  in  their 
simplicity  and  directness  with  the  strained 
and  controversial  language,  say,  of  this 
Epistle  to  the  Romans. 

But  the  more  deeply  the  Gospels  and 
the  Epistles  are  studied,  the  more  deeply 
we  breathe  the  spirit  of  the  one  and  of 
the  other, — and  this  we  will  do,  not  in 
our  days  of  easy  and  complacent  curiosity, 
but  in  our  hours  of  misgiving  and  of 
necessity  and  of  unworldliness, — the  more 
reason  shall  we  have  to  confess  that  the 
Jesus  of  History  whose  mind  we  have 
in  the  Gospels  has  simply  become  the 
Christ  of  Experience  in  the  writings  of 
St.  Paul. 

It  is  true,  of  course,  that  Paul  is  a  man, 
39 


If  God  be  for  Us 


and  a  man  of  very  unusual  moral  and  in- 
tellectual dimensions.  And  it  is  no  part 
of  Christ's  proper  influence  upon  His  dis- 
ciples to  paralyse  their  own  individual 
life,  making  them  impersonal  echoes  of 
Himself.  Christ  works  in  men  as  He 
promised  He  would  in  the  world — first 
the  seed,  then  the  ear,  then  the  full  corn 
in  the  ear.  The  ear  is  not  the  seed  and 
is  not  at  all  like  the  seed,  but  it  sprang 
from  the  seed  by  an  invincible  process.  A 
disciple  is  faithful  to  his  master,  not  by 
repeating  in  later  circumstances  words 
which  the  master  uttered  in  his  day.  A 
disciple  proves  that  he  is  faithful  by  em- 
bodying in  his  words  and  in  the  impres- 
sion which  he  makes  upon  his  time  the 
kind  of  atmosphere  and  influence  and 
spiritual  direction  which  his  master 
created  in  his  day. 

And  what  people  should  ask,  who  are  in 
any  honest  doubt  as  to  the  relation  be- 
tween Jesus  and  Paul,  is  whether  there  is 
not  in  the  whole  impression  and  testimony 
of  Paul  a  background  of  ideas  concerning 
40 


If  God  be  for  Us 


God  and  man  and  life  and  duty  such  as 
were  strange  and  indeed  abhorrent  to  him 
until  Christ  encountered  him  and  first 
compelled  and  then  convinced  him  to 
accept  them  as  the  truth. 

It  is  not  at  all  to  be  wondered  at  that 
St.  Paul  should  say  things  that  were  en- 
tirely his  own.  He  had  a  story  to  tell,  his 
own  story,  the  story  of  how  Christ, — and 
all  that  Christ  meant  as  to  God  and  men 
and  everything, — how  Christ  had  come 
into  his  hfe.  It  is  not  to  be  wondered  at 
that  he  has  much  to  say  of  the  struggle 
and  the  process,  of  the  inertia  of  his  own 
nature  which  opposed  the  great  change, 
of  the  hostility  of  his  own  prejudices.  It 
is  not  to  be  wondered  at  that,  in  his  great 
desire  that  others,  especially  men  of  his 
own  race  and  of  his  own  traditions,  hav- 
ing his  own  difficulties  and  repugnances, 
should  not  allow  those  traditions  and 
difficulties  and  repugnances  to  close  their 
hearts  to  this  Christ  who  had  made  new 
heavens  and  a  new  earth  for  him — it  is 
not  to  be  wondered  at  that  for  the  sake 

41 


If  God  be  for  Us 


of  these  he  reasoned  and  argued  and  inter- 
preted. He  himself  tells  us  that  to  the 
Jews  he  became  a  Jew,  that  is  to  say,  he 
put  himself  once  again  at  the  standpoint 
of  a  Jew,  and  summoned  back  to  his  own 
imagination  all  the  possible  and  conceiv- 
able obstacles  to  the  acceptance  of  Christ 
which  could  occur  to  a  Jew, — and  why  ? 
— "  if,  by  any  means,  they  also  might  be 
saved  !  " 

But  pierce  through  that  language  of 
controversy  and  appeal,  and  what  have 
you  ?  What  is  the  conception  of  God 
which  lies  behind  ?  Is  it  not  that  God  is 
the  Spirit  of  forgiving  Love,  the  Father  in 
heaven  whose  Redeeming  Passion  in  Jesus 
endured  the  Cross,  who  gave  Himself  to 
an  undiscerning  world  ?  Is  not  the  great 
Faith  behind  the  entire  Pauline  litera- 
ture simply  this, — that  God  is  for  us  ? 
But  that  was  the  Faith  and  testimony  of 
Jesus,  which  He  sealed  by  His  patience  on 
Calvary. 

It  was  God's  acceptance  of  Christ,  it 
was  the  ratification  by  God  of  Christ's 
42 


If  God  be  for  Us 


whole  enterprise  on  behalf  of  man — and 
this  the  appearance  of  the  Risen  Lord 
attested  for  Paul — it  was  this,  that  is  to 
say,  it  was  Christ,  who  gave  Paul  the  God 
whom  he  preached. 

God  is  altogether  on  our  side.  And  if 
this  be  so,  what  hostility  from  the  side  of 
the  world,  or  from  the  region  of  our  own 
thoughts  and  memories  and  fears,  is 
worthy  to  be  compared  with  this  final  and 
blessed  resource  ?  True,  we  may  be  called 
upon  to  suffer.  We  see  not  all  things  put 
under  Him  ;  but  we  see  Christ.  It  is 
true  that  the  world  will  organise  itself 
against  us.  Without  may  be  fightings, 
within  may  be  fears.  Persecution,  famine, 
nakedness,  peril,  sword — ^that  may  be  our 
portion.  (Nay,  it  had  been  their  portion.) 
The  words  of  the  Psalmist  may  be  the 
only  words  that  suit  our  case  :  "  For  Thy 
sake  we  are  killed  all  the  day  long  ;  the 
world  regards  us  as  sheep  meant  for 
slaughter."  But  there  is  always  some- 
thing that  can  come  nearer  to  us  than  all 
these  threatenings  :    "  Oh,  the  deep,  deep 

48 


If  God  be  for  Us 


love  of  Jesus  !  "  "  Who  shall  separate 
us  from  the  love  of  Christ  ?  "  Surely, 
*'  no  conceivable  power  of  life  or  of  death, 
or  of  the  angelic  hierarchy,  nothing  in 
present  circumstances  or  future  destiny, 
no  possible  force ;  neither  the  highest 
height  of  heaven  nor  the  deepest  depth 
of  hell,  no  possible  creation  of  God  other 
than  what  we  now  know  to  exist,  shall  be 
able  to  tear  us  from  that  which  holds 
us  in  a  grasp  strong  as  the  oath  of 
God — His  love  to  us  in  Christ  Jesus  our 
Lord." 

"  We  are  not  to  build  the  edifice  of  a 
life  which  at  the  top  is  to  be  within  sight 
of  God.  We  are  to  start  from  God,  Who 
from  eternity  and  all  along  has  been 
beforehand  with  us  :  in  His  external,  per- 
sonal love  predestinating,  creating,  call- 
ing, pardoning,  holding,  and  keeping  us  in 
continual  growth  for  eternal  glory.  And 
the  one  power  of  religion  is,  therefore, 
faith, — that  faculty  by  which  we  look 
continually  out  of  ourselves,  and,  starting 
from  God,  committing  ourselves  wholly 
44 


If  God  be  for  Us 


to  God,  raise  the  fabric  of  life,  in  the 
community  of  a  true  human  brotherhood, 
upon  the  secure  basis  of  the  love  of  Him 
who  created  us  and  will  satisfy  utterly  the 
being  which  He  has  given  us." 

Human  speech  can  go  no  farther  than 
that. 


45 


Chapter   III 


"  Who  ahall  separate  ua  from  the  love  of  Chriit  ?  " 


Chapter   III 


The  greater  portion  of  the  New  Testa- 
ment was  written  with  the  purpose  of 
encouraging  those  who  had  become  Chris- 
tians to  remain  Christians  in  a  world 
which  was  steadily  becoming  more  hostile, 
in  a  world  also  which  was  betraying  itself 
more  and  more  clearly  as  being  opposed  to 
the  way  of  Christ  in  its  very  principles. 
We  cannot  summarise  all  the  various 
warnings,  encouragements,  methods  of 
the  spiritual  life  which  the  New  Testa- 
ment contains,  we  cannot  summarise 
these  more  fairly  than  to  say  that  the  New 
Testament  assures  good  people  who  are 
beset  by  life,  beset  by  a  world-system  which 
is  either  cruel  and  persecuting,  or  im- 
moral and  seductive,  that  the  only  safe 
way,  the  only  happy  way  of  serving  Christ 
is  the  deep  and  unreserved  way.  The 
question  which  their  leaders  and  teachers 
£  49 


If  God  be  for  Us 


in  the  Christian  life  soon  learned  to  con- 
centrate upon  was  simply  this  : 

Are  you  satisfied  with  Christ  ?  Is  He 
enough  for  you  ?  Are  you  ready  to  go  on 
in  His  promises,  and  with  the  resources 
which  He  in  the  secret  place  of  your 
spirit  provides  for  you  day  by  day  ? 

At  a  very  early  time  all  hope  passed 
out  of  the  Church  that  Christians  would 
ever  be  able  to  be  at  home  in  this  world. 
At  a  very  early  time  they  began  to 
look  upon  themselves  as  "  pilgrims  and 
strangers  "  in  the  earth.  And  the  dan- 
gers which  beset  them  were  felt  by  the 
wiser  and  more  sensitive  spirits  among 
them  to  be  the  same  dangers  as  beset 
pilgrims  always,  viz.  that  they  might 
tire  by  the  way,  that  the  scenes  through 
which  they  were  passing  might  corrupt 
them,  that  the  greater  obstacles  might 
depress  their  energy,  or  that  the  smaller 
obstacles  might  wear  down  the  fine  edge  of 
their  intention,  or  that  the  mere  length 
and  monotony  of  the  journey  might  arouse 
the  spirit  of  questioning  within  them,  and 

50 


If  God  be  for  Us 


might  even  raise  in  their  souls  the  last, 
the  only  question — that  question  which 
is  of  such  a  kind  that  the  soul  which  has 
once  even  felt  its  force  can  never  be  the 
same  again — the  question  as  to  the  worth 
of  all  high  contendings  in  a  world  like 
this,  which  is  girt  about  with  death  and 
silence. 

I  seem  to  see  the  whole  effort  of  the 
New  Testament,  and  the  effort  became 
more  insistent  as  the  years  passed,  and 
the  light  of  the  first  great  day  of  the  Lord 
went  down — I  seem  to  see  the  whole  effort 
of  the  New  Testament  to  be  to  rally  and 
reinforce  the  souls  of  the  faithful.  The 
evils  of  the  world  are  not  made  light  of, 
the  things  which  are  against  faith  are  not 
passed  over  in  silence  or  alluded  to  with 
mere  defiance.  No  :  but  good  souls  who 
have  begun  to  face  life  in  the  power  and 
love  of  Christ  are  urged  to  make  no  end 
of  trial  of  the  treasures  of  compensation 
and  reinforcement  and  private  blessedness 
which  are  to  be  found  in  Him  whom  they 
have    chosen.     They   have    meat   to    eat 

51 


If  God  be  for  Us 


that  the  world  knows  not  of  ;  and  the 
acutest  suffering,  if  wisely  endured,  may 
only  yield  some  new  delicacy  of  the  love 
of  Christ.  Let  them,  as  Christian  in 
Pilgrim's  Progress  was  advised,  when  he 
entered  upon  a  way  where  the  lions 
roared — let  them  keep  well  in  the  middle 
of  the  path,  and  though  the  very  breath 
of  lions  may  threaten  them,  they  will 
pass  through  unscathed  to  the  City  of 
God. 

It  is  a  great  part  of  the  teaching  of  the 
New  Testament — and  through  the  New 
Testament  it  has  found  its  way  into  every 
serious  treatment  of  this  life  of  ours,  so 
that  to-day  it  mingles  in  our  atmosphere 
for  the  support  of  many  who  may  not 
pause  to  thank  God  for  it — that  we  may 
overcome  the  evils  of  existence  by  return- 
ing more  deeply  into  the  life  of  our  own 
spirits,  that  we  may  gain  the  victory  over 
things  by  the  way  of  some  deeper  and 
holier  understanding  of  ourselves  ;  that, 
in  the  language  of  pure  Christian  experi- 
ence, we  may  "  more  than  conquer 
52 


If  God  be  for  Us 


through  Jesus  Christ  our  Lord."  "  We 
may  be  pressed  on  every  side,  yet  not 
straitened ;  we  may  be  perplexed,  yet  not 
unto  despair  ;  we  may  be  pursued,  yet 
not  forsaken  ;  we  may  be  smitten  down, 
yet  not  destroyed,  always  bearing  about 
in  the  body  the  dying  of  Jesus,  that  the 
life  also  of  Jesus  may  be  manifested  in 
our  body." 

And  there,  perhaps,  we  are  at  the  very 
point  of  view  and  of  feeling  for  entering 
definitely  into  this  great  passage.  "  Who 
shall  separate  us  from  the  love  of  Christ  ?  " 
It  is  the  invincible  communion  of  Christ 
with  the  soul  which  is  the  basis  of  all  that 
follows.  The  hard  things  of  life  are  not 
denied.  The  possibility  of  weird  and  un- 
canny things  is  not  denied.  It  is  even 
admitted  that  there  may  be  about  us 
legions  of  spiritual  powers,  subtle,  per- 
vasive, diabolical,  organised  by  some  arch- 
fiend. It  is  confessed  that  we  live  our 
lives  in  a  little  world  in  the  midst  of 
appalling  spaces,  such  as  would  make  us 
feel  abject  and  contemptible  in  our  own 

53 


If  God  be  for  Us 


eyes  if  we  did  not  believe,  as  Christ  asks 
us  to  believe,  that  human  life  means 
something  to  God. 

The  natural  terror  and  riskiness  of  our 
position  is  in  no  wise  softened  ;  nor  is  the 
attempt  made,  as  has  always  been  com- 
mon in  the  mere  rhetoric  of  the  will,  from 
Marcus  Aurelius  to  Emerson  and  the 
moderns,  to  disregard  and  defy  our  ele- 
mentary and  abysmal  circumstances.  No  ; 
what  St.  Paul  says  and  promises  and  offers 
as  the  basis  for  an  unaffrighted  and  as- 
piring human  life  is  that  nothing — no 
cruelty  at  the  hands  of  man,  no  hot 
breath  from  Nature's  possible  malignancy, 
no  chill  breath  from  her  vastness  and  un- 
concern, can  separate  us  from,  or  can,  by 
virtue  of  its  superior  power,  come  be- 
tween us  and  the  love  of  God  which  is  in 
Christ  Jesus  our  Lord. 

There,  one's  mind  comes  to  a  place  of 
cross-roads,  where  various  highways  in- 
vite one  to  proceed.  For  example,  this  : 
that  Christianity  is  not  in  the  first  in- 
stance a  philosophy  of  things  as  they  are, 

54 


If  God  be  for  Us 


still  less  is  Christianity  a  defence  of  things 
as  they  are. 

I  do  not  know  how  it  has  come  to  pass 
that  the  defence  of  this  world  as  it  is 
to-day    should    somehow    or    other    have 
been  foisted  upon  the  Christian  Church. 
Those  who  are  opposed  to  our  faith  or  to 
any  faith  thrust  the  dreadful  facts  of  life 
before  our  eyes  and  ask  us  with  various 
tones  of  anger  and  contempt  and  sorrow 
to  explain  how  and  why  this  and  that 
came  into  being  in  a  world  which  God 
controls.     But  when  did  the  Church  of 
Christ  ever  declare  that  things  as  they 
are,  are  all  right  ?     When  was  the  Church 
so  satisfied  with  things  as  they  are  that 
she  should  be  held  as  bound  to    defend 
the  natural  order  as  the  very   mind   of 
God  ?     The  Church  has  never  once  de- 
clared that  things  were  all  right,  or  even 
that  they  were  pretty  well.     In  her  great 
days — and,  hke    every  institution  whose 
instruments  are  human,  the   Church  has 
had  her  good  days  and   her  bad  days — 
the  Churchy  in  her  great  days  has  rather 

55 


If  God  be  for  Us 


declared  that  things  were  all  wrong,  all 
bad,  all  rooted  in  principles  which  were  the 
negation  of  God.  Of  course  I  know,  when 
I  give  my  mind  to  the  matter,  how  it  has 
come  about  that  we  who  believe  in  God 
according  to  the  Gospel  of  Christ,  have 
had  thrust  upon  us  the  responsibility  of 
giving  an  interpretation  of  the  world  in 
terms  of  God  as  against  the  interpretation 
of  the  world  in  other  terms. 

It  is  not  our  message,  and  it  never  was, 
that  "  all's  right  with  the  world,"  in  the 
sense  that  things  as  they  are,  are  accord- 
ing to  the  will  of  God.  On  the  very  con- 
trary, what  we  say  is  that  the  world  as  it 
has  come  to  be  is  such,  and  is  pervaded 
and  haunted  by  such  powers  and  organ- 
isations of  spirit,  that  when  He  in  whom 
we  see  God  came  to  our  earth,  it  concen- 
trated its  instinctive  forces  and  put  the 
Holy  One  to  death. 

It  is  none  of  our  business  as  Christians 

to  explain  how  the  world  has  come  to  be 

what  it  is.     It  is  our  business,  of  course,  as 

reasonable  beings  ;  but  there  we  share  the 

56 


If  God  be  for  Us 


responsibility  with  all  who  claim  to  have 
reason, — to  try  to  co-ordinate  this  mul- 
titudinous world  into  some  kind  of  unity, 
to  relate  things  to  one  another,  and  by  the 
force  of  certain  necessary  laws  of  thought 
to  impose  upon  the  raw  material  of  exis- 
tence some  conceivable  idea  or  order.  But 
this,  I  repeat,  is  a  task  which  falls  to 
us,  not  as  Christians,  but  as  reasonable 
beings,  who  can  no  more  bear  to  live  in 
a  haphazard  and  untidy  universe,  from 
the  intellectual  point  of  view,  than  we 
should  be  able  to  live  in  an  untidy  and 
chaotic  room  which  we  never  explored, 
never  mastered  and  put  to  rights. 

But  if  the  retort  is  made  that  it  falls 
particularly  upon  us  who  believe  in  the 
Goodness  of  God  to  account  for,  and  thus 
to  defend,  those  dark  facts  of  life  which 
occur  to  our  minds  the  moment  we  reflect, 
there  are  two  answers  which  suggest  them- 
selves to  me  at  this  moment  in  reply. 
For  one  thing,  if  we  who  believe  must  give 
some  account  of  the  evil  in  things,  then 
those  who  do   not   believe  will  have  to 

57 


If  God  be  for  Us 


account  for  the  equally  obstinate  and 
equally  undeniable  good  in  things.  If 
men  who  believe  in  God  stand  confronted 
in  all  their  speculations  with  the  problem 
of  Evil  in  the  world,  men  who  do  not 
believe  stand  confronted  in  all  their  specu- 
lations with  the  problem  of  Good. 

As  the  poet  puts  it,  our  faith  is  diversi- 
fied by  doubt ;  but  their  doubt  is  diversi- 
fied by  faith.  If  we  have  not  brought  all 
things  into  subjection  to  our  belief,  they 
have  not  brought  all  things  into  subjection 
to  their  denial.  If  we  who  believe  in 
God  must  account,  for  example,  for  the 
pain  of  the  brute  creation,  they  have  to 
account  for  the  beauty  of  flowers,  for  the 
glory  and  order  of  created  things,  for  the 
presence  in  this  vexed  world  of  such  a 
love  for  human  beings  and  for  truth  as 
was  able  to  endure  the  sweat  of  blood  in 
Gethsemane  and  the  nails  and  the  thirst 
and  the  silence  of  God  on  Calvary. 

And   the   other  thing   which   we  quite 
properly  and  quite  firmly  may  say  is  that 
we  who  believe  in  God  believe  that  God 
58 


If  God  be  for  Us 


gave  to  man  the  power  of  choice  and  of 
moral  freedom.  It  would  be  hazardous, 
and  it  is  not  necessary  for  our  argument, 
to  define  the  bounds  of  man's  freedom. 
But  freedom  there  is,  and  in  a  world 
where  there  is  freedom  there  have  always 
been  self-seeking  souls,  and  the  tragedies 
for  themselves  and  for  others  which  self- 
seeking  brings.  And  so,  the  world,  society, 
as  we  see  it  to-day,  is  not  the  pure 
expression  of  God  ;  it  is  largely  the  conse- 
quence of  man,  his  self-love,  his  self- 
interests  encountering  indeed  the  un- 
quenched  protest  and  appeal  of  God. 

I  must  not  allow  myself,  however,  to 
dwell  longer  upon  such  matters,  though  I 
do  hold  there  is  room  for  some  clear 
thinking  upon  them  in  order  to  divest 
ourselves  as  believers  of  a  responsibility 
for  the  intellectual  solution  of  life  which 
was  never  properly  our  concern.  We 
shall  see  what  precisely  is  our  concern  by 
keeping  closely  to  St.  Paul's  thought  in 
this  passage,  where,  in  the  fullness  of  a 
great  wave  of  fervour  and  confidence,  he 

5d 


If  God  be  for  Us 


reveals  for  our  advantage  the  things  which 
lay  at  the  basis  of  his  own  life. 

We  pass  our  days,  he  seems  to  say,  in  a 
world  of  hostile  pressure,  tribulation,  dis- 
tress, persecution,  famine,  nakedness,  peril, 
sword,  death,  life,  angels,  principalities, 
things  present,  things  to  come,  powers, 
height,  depth.  What  then  ?  What  are 
we  to  make  of  these  things  which  are  the 
facts  of  life,  as  we  in  our  timid  speech  to- 
day are  too  fond  of  calling  them  ?  For, 
just  as,  when  we  do  not  like  a  person, 
we  sometimes  indulge  our  private  anger 
under  the  guise  of  being  zealous  for  truth, 
telling  him  the  unpleasant  things  we  can 
remember,  calling  these  "  the  facts,"  so, 
when  we  do  not  like  God,  our  minds  acquire 
a  morbid  power  of  accumulating  dis- 
heartening things  which  we  also  call  the 
facts.  Well,  St.  Paul  names  very  gener- 
ously those  disheartening  things  which 
those  who  are  so  minded  might  quote  to 
impugn  the  holy  or  even  the  wise  govern- 
ment of  this  world.  But  he  does  not  call 
them  facts.  Here  the  Apostle  antici- 
60 


If  God  be  for  Us 


pates  much  that  modern  philosophy  has 
given  us.  He  virtually  says,  There  are  no 
facts.  There  is  only  one  fact,  the  fact 
of  God  in  Christ.  All  the  other  so-called 
facts  are  mere  circumstances  of  that  one 
supreme  fact,  and  take  their  place  for  or 
against  that  one  supreme  fact.  Tribu- 
lation, distress,  anguish,  persecution,  death, 
life,  things  present,  things  to  come — 
they  are  all  here.  Yes,  but  we  also  are 
here,  and  Christ,  the  power  and  comfort 
of  God,  is  with  us. 

I  know,  of  course,  that  there  is  such 
a  thing  as  objective  reality  ;  but  for  the 
purposes  of  living  it  is  wise  to  believe 
that  things  in  this  world  are  according  to 
the  depth  and  purity  and  passion  of  our 
souls.  The  spies  who  went  to  search  out 
the  Land  of  Promise  encountered  the  same 
facts  :  but  they  were  not  the  same  facts 
for  Joshua  the  son  of  Nun  and  Caleb  the 
son  of  Jephunneh,  as  they  were  for  the 
others.  Seeing  what  they  saw,  the  others 
decided  that  it  was  a  bad  business.  See- 
ing the   same  things,  Joshua  and   Caleb 

61 


If  God  be  for  Us 


decided  that  it  was  well  worth  while. 
"  We  saw  the  sons  of  Anak,"  said  the 
others,  "  giants  of  great  stature.  And 
we  were  as  grasshoppers  in  our  own  eyes, 
and  so  were  we  in  their  eyes."  We  impute 
ourselves,  said  Tennyson.  A  man  who 
feels  like  a  grasshopper  is  sure  that  he 
looks  like  a  grasshopper.  But  that  was 
not  how  the  same  set  of  facts  impressed 
Joshua  and  Caleb.  They  said,  "  If  the 
Lord  delight  in  us,  we  be  well  able  to 
overcome  them."  And  there  you  have 
what  made  the  difference  ;  and  it  is  what 
makes  the  difference  up  and  down  and 
through  and  through.  There  are  no  factg. 
There  are  only  impressions  of  facts,  re- 
actions upon  facts,  and  the  nature  of  the 
impression  or  of  the  reaction  depends  upon 
the  force  and  confidence  of  your  soul,  and 
that  ultimately  depends  upon  your  sense 
of  what  lies  at  the  back  of  things,  your 
sense  of  God. 

Now  that  is  precisely  what  St.  Paul  says 
here,    and    saying   what   he   says   in   the 
height  and  fullness  of  his  spirit  (which  is 
62 


If  God  be  for  Us 


the  only  condition  in  which  we  can  speak 
about  hfe,  for  in  such  a  mood  we  are 
speaking  out  of  the  heart  of  hfe  itself),  he 
has  anticipated  all  Christian  philosophy 
and  idealism,  and  has  erected  for  the 
long-enduring  religious  soul  an  impreg- 
nable retreat  and  place  of  recovery.  Shall 
these  things  separate  us  from  the  love  of 
Christ  ?  And  as  he  uses  the  words,  they 
form  not  a  question,  but  an  answer.  It 
all  depends,  he  would  say,  upon  where 
you  begin.  I  begin  with  God,  with  God 
as  He  has  come  to  me  in  Christ.  That  for 
me  is  the  one  indisputable  experience. 
Every  other  thing  in  life,  and  all  life, 
must  in  my  universe  stand  up  to  that  one 
fact.  You  have  not  merely  to  account 
for  those  dark  things  such  as  tribulation, 
anguish,  death,  and  the  rest, — you  have 
now  to  account  for  me,  for  this  fitness 
which  I  feel,  with  which  I  glow,  to  pass 
through  the  furnace  of  those  formidable 
things.  It  is  a  phrase  of  the  more  warm- 
hearted biologists  of  to-day  that  life  is 
a  thing  by  itself  and  not  to  be  accounted 

68 


If  God  be  for  Us 


for  in  terms  of  chemistry  or  mechanics  ; 
that  this  Hfe-urge,  this  elan  vital,  is  the 
ultimate  thing  which  uses  and  refuses, 
according  to  its  own  primordial  genius 
and  intention,  the  world  through  which 
it  flows. 

In  the  world  of  morals,  face  to  face  with 
those  sinister  aspects  of  life  which  would 
seem  to  mean  that  we  are  all  of  us  the 
victims  of  fate,  of  heredity  and  environ- 
ment— in  such  a  world,  the  one  sure 
datum — and  it  remains  inexplicable  until 
we  take  our  courage  in  both  hands  and 
believe  in  God,  whereupon  it  becomes  the 
clue  to  the  mystery  of  existence, — the 
one  sure  datum  is  that  a  man  acts  from 
his  own  centre. 

So,  in  the  world  of  spiritual  realities, 
the  one  indisputable  fact  is  that  God  in 
Christ  can  so  deal  with  the  soul  that 
confides  itself  to  Him,  that  there  and 
then,  and  so  long  as  the  Faith  and  Com- 
munion are  maintained,  there  is  given 
to  that  soul  a  personal  resiliency,  a  power 
of    happy  reaction  against  disheartening 

64i 


If  God  be  for  Us 


things,  a  prospect  of  eventual  triumph 
which  for  the  reHgious  mind  is  the  One 
Fact  of  Life,  colouring,  qualifying,  an- 
nulling, reorganising  all  other  facts,  for  it 
implies  God  and  commits  God  to  us  in 
love. 

"  What  is  this  psahn  from  pitiable  places 

Glad  where  the  messengers  of  peace  have  trod  ? 
Whose  are  these  beautiful  and  holy  faces 
Lit  with  their  loving  and  aflame  with  God  ? 

"  Eager  and  faint,  empassionate  and  lonely. 
These  in  their  hour  shall  prophesy  again  : 
This  is  His  will  who  hath  endured,  and  only 
Sendeth  the  promise  where  He  sends  the  pain. 

"  Ay  unto  these  distribute th  the  Giver 

Sorrow  and  sanctity,  and  loves  them  well. 
Grants  them  a  power  and  passion  to  deliver 

Hearts  from  th©  prison-house  and  souls  from  hell. 

*'  Thinking  hereof  I  wot  not  if  the  portal 
Opeth  already  to  my  Lord  above  : 
Lo  there  is  no  more  mortal  and  inmiortal. 

Nought  is  on  earth  or  in  the  heavens  but  love. 

**  Surely  He  cometh,  and  a  thousand  voices 
Call  to  the  saints  and  to  the  deaf  are  dumb  ; 
Surely  He  cometh,  and  the  earth  rejoices. 
Glad  in  His  coming  who  hath  sworn,  I  come. 

F  65 


If  God  be  for  Us 


'  This  hath  He  done  and  shall  we  not  adore  Him  ? 

This  shall  He  do  and  can  we  still  despair  ? 
Come,  let  us  quickly  fling  ourselves  before  Him, 

Cast  at  His  feet  the  burthen  of  our  care. 

'  Flash  from  our  eyes  the  glow  of  our  thanksgiving. 
Glad  and  regretful,  confident  and  calm. 

Then  thro'  all  life  and  what  is  after  living 
Thrill  to  the  tireless  music  of  a  psalm. 

'  Yea,  thro'  life,  death,  thro'  sorrow  and  thro'  sinning 
He  shall  suffice  me,  for  He  hath  sufficed  : 

Christ  is  the  end,  for  Christ  was  the  beginning  ; 
Christ  the  beginning,  for  the  end  is  Christ." 


66 


Chapter   IV 


**  Shall   tribvilation  .  .  .  ?    Nay,  neither  death,  nor 
life  .  .  ." 


Chapter   IV 


In  our  last  study  what  I  wished  to  bring 
out  was  that  Christ  offers  and  secures  to 
the  soul  which  confides  itself  to  Him — a 
blessedness,  a  condition  of  peace,  of  well- 
being,  of  confidence,  which  it  is  not  in  the 
power  of  any  event  or  set  of  events  to 
corrupt  or  to  terminate.  And  I  went  on 
to  say  that  that  is  still  what  we  claim  as 
the  proper  influence  of  Christ  in  our  souls. 
Christianity,  I  was  meaning  to  say  all  the 
time,  is  not  a  philosophy  of  life,  though  it 
is  our  point  of  view  for  the  interpretation 
of  life  :  it  is  not  a  defence  of  things  as 
they  are,  though  we  do  say  that  if  things 
are  bad,  hard  to  endure  even  with  the 
help  of  a  faith  in  God,  they  are  simply 
appalling  and  overwhelming  without  such 
a  faith. 

No  :   Christ  came  into  the  world  not  to 
clear  away  all  mysteries.    He  came  into 

69 


If  God  be  for  Us 


the  world  to  enable  us  to  become  good  men, 
and  it  is  as  we  become  good  men  with  His 
kind  of  goodness  that  life  becomes  intel- 
ligible. 

And  so  here,  St.  Paul  does  not  say  that 
all  things  become  easy  to  those  who  are 
in  Christ ;  that  these  cease  to  have  any 
anguish  of  the  body  or  any  shadow  upon 
their  soul.  He  does  not  say  that  they 
cease  to  suffer,  that  they  cease  to  have 
their  perplexities,  that  life  becomes  a 
smooth  thing  for  them  and  death  spreads 
its  dark  wings  and  flies  away.  He  says 
none  of  these  things.  Nay,  he  says  the 
very  opposite.  Every  single  thing  that 
makes  life  poignant  to  the  human  soul 
remains.  Nay,  to  us  Christians,  in  virtue 
of  our  new  sensitiveness,  those  sinister 
things  have  a  greater  power  to  give  pain  ; 
and  in  addition,  our  new  sensitiveness  has 
introduced  us  to  whole  worlds  of  possible 
thrusts  and  wounds  and  shadows,  of 
which  unexercised  souls  have  no  experi- 
ence. Life  is  more  vivid,  more  acute, 
more  directly  assailing  to  us — what  then  ? 

70 


If  God  be  for  Us 


What  advantage  have  we  over  others  ? 
We  have  this  advantage — nothing  can 
separate  us  from  the  love  of  God  which  is 
in  Christ  Jesus  our  Lord. 

What,  then,  we  see  in  this  great  passage, 
in  the  fervour  and  outpouring  of  which 
the  Apostle  is  disclosing  the  very  basis  of 
his  spirit,  the  final  fears  and  final  faith 
which  wrestled  within  him  in  the  depths 
of  his  being — what  we  see  is,  a  man  facing, 
in  the  power  of  his  experience  of  Christ, 
the  worst  that  life  can  bring,  triumphing, 
in  the  power  of  his  communion,  over  the 
evils  of  existence,  and  over  such  spectres 
of  the  mind  as  he  has  already  known  and 
as  he  can  arouse  by  the  force  of  his  very 
imagination. 

It  is  as  though  he  were  saying,  for  the 
fortifying  of  his  own  spirit,  "  Here  stand 
I,  in  the  blessed  communion  of  Jesus 
Christ,  my  heart  dwelhng  in  light,  in 
confidence,  in  the  love  of  God.  This 
truly,  as  the  Master  said,  is  life  eternal,  to 
know  God  and  to  know  Jesus  as  God's 
Son.     And  now,  will  it  always  be  so  with 

71 


If  God  be  for  Us 


me  ?  But  why  should  it  not  always  be 
so  with  me  ?  What  will  ever  be  able  to 
happen  of  such  a  kind  that  I  shall  lose 
under  its  pressure  the  Resource  of  Christ  ? 
I  know  that  anything  may  happen  to  me. 
I  can  foresee  things  that  are  very  likely 
to  happen.  I  can  foresee  the  world's 
hostiUty  closing  in  upon  me  :  the  tribu- 
lation, the  distress,  the  persecution,  the 
famine,  the  nakedness,  the  peril,  the  sword 
[at  this  point  he  recalled  a  verse  from 
an  old  psalm  as  precisely  fitting  his  own 
case  :  "  For  Thy  sake  we  are  killed  all  the 
day  long  :  we  are  esteemed  to  be  sheep 
appointed  for  the  slaughter."]  And  in 
such  trials,  alas !  I  may  for  a  moment 
shrink  in  pain  or  in  fear.  But  though 
my  spirit,  or  rather  my  flesh,  may  wince 
and  falter.  He,  my  Saviour,  will  still  be 
to  me  what  He  is.  He  cannot  deny  Him- 
self. And  surely  He  will  come  the  more 
near  to  me  in  such  a  time  of  pressure, 
when,  if  He  is  to  help  me  at  all,  He  must 
come  closer  to  me  than  the  fears  of  my 
own  weak  heart.  I  thank  God  that  in  this 
72 


If  God  be  for  Us 


matter  I  am  not  left  to  guess-work.  I 
have  already  in  the  furnace  tasted  how 
gracious  the  Lord  is  ;  so  that  I  have  not 
only  passed  through  times  of  affliction, 
but  I  have  more  than  conquered  in  them. 
For  I  have  come  out  of  them  with  a  new 
experience  of  Christ,  a  new  and  blessed 
memory  for  my  soul  to  carry  forward 
wherewith  to  meet  such  trials  as  await 
me." 

At  this  point  the  Apostle  in  his  solitary 
thinking  one  day  paused.  In  a  little 
while,  we  may  believe,  he  resumed  his 
journey,  his  spirit  entering  now  a  dark 
defile  where  there  is  no  accustomed  path, 
for  a  man  goes  this  way  once  only.  St. 
Paul  looked  into  the  face  of  Death.  What 
has  Death  to  say  to  Christ  ?  What  has 
Christ  to  say  to  Death  ?  What  will  all 
this  glow  and  tumult  of  my  heart  avail 
me  when,  one  day,  I  am  struggling  for 
my  breath  ?  Ah  well,  once  more  I  do 
not  know  how  I  shall  acquit  myself  in 
that  lonely  hour  when,  it  may  be,  far 
from  home,  with  no  dear  voice  to  hold 

73 


If  God  be  for  Us 


my  wandering  mind  to  its  own  highest 
way,  with  no  touch  and  movement  of 
dear  hands  about  me,  I  meet  the  last 
enemy.  I  may  pass  out  of  Ufe  as  in  a 
chariot  of  fire,  erect,  confident,  antici- 
pating, hke  Stephen,  whom  I  saw  die.  Or 
I  may  struggle  out  of  life  in  pain  and  in 
the  disquietude  of  pain,  perplexed,  un- 
sure, afraid.  I  do  not  know:  I  do  not 
know  how  I  shall  behave  myself  at  the 
very  end.  What  then?  "Who  shall 
separate  me  from  the  love  of  Christ  ? 
Shall  death  ?  "  Nay,  surely  not !  Surely 
if  there  is  one  moment  in  which  more 
closely,  with  a  greater  passion  of  assist- 
ance, Christ  will  be  with  me,  it  will  be  in 
that  instant  when,  having  let  go  my  hold 
on  life  as  I  know  it,  I  am  passing  through 
the  momentary  void  and  amazement  to- 
wards the  life  that  is  undisclosed. 

I  do  not  know  how  I  shall  behave  :  no, 
but  then  I  have  not  for  many  years  back 
been  building  myself  up  on  how  I  might 
behave.  The  great  thing  God  working 
through  my  moral  life  has  taught  me,  is 

74 


If  God  be  for  Us 


that  my  salvation  ultimately  does  not 
depend  upon  my  hold  on  God,  but  upon 
God's  hold  on  me.  And  although  I  have 
lived  in  the  light  of  that  belief  since  that 
day  outside  the  gate  of  Damascus,  still 
it  may  take  the  whole  experience  of 
dying  to  discover  to  me  how  utterly  I  am 
nothing,  and  how  utterly  the  love  of  God 
is  all  in  all.  I  do  not  know  how  at  the 
last  moment  I  shall  behave,  but  I  know 
how  Christ  will  behave  towards  me.  I 
may  never  for  one  instant  lose  the  way 
to  His  breast ;  but  even  if  it  should  be 
otherwise,  if  in  the  access  of  some  mortal 
agony  my  mind  should  be  darkened — that 
will  be  His  own  beautiful  subterfuge  to  help 
me  through,  and  all  the  time  He  will  be 
holding  me  as  a  mother  would  hold  her 
delirious  child. 

Here  once  again,  on  some  unrecorded 
day  of  musing,  of  fear,  and  of  victory 
over  fear,  the  soul  of  the  Apostle  rested. 
When  he  resumed,  it  was  for  the  last 
stage  of  the  journey,  when  as  a  man,  and 
as  a  thinking  man  of  his  own  race  and 

75 


If  God  be  for  Us 


tradition,  he  confronted  the  world  con- 
cerning which,  except  that  it  is  in  the 
hands  of  the  God  and  Father  of  our  Lord 
and  Saviour  Jesus  Christ,  we  know  nothing 
of  a  surety,  the  land  which  lies  on 
the  other  side  of  death.  What  awaits 
me  there  ?  And  how  shall  what  awaits  me 
there  affect  this  present  warmth  of  my 
heart  in  Christ  ?  "A  man  giveth  up  the 
ghost,  and  where  is  he  ?  "  What  shall 
become  of  me,  of  this  so  feeble  frame  which 
holds  all  the  treasure  of  my  life,  in  that 
dim,  high-vaulted,  spirit-haunted  place, 
where  dwell  the  souls  of  men  somehow  ? 
Here  I  have  no  experience  at  all  on  which 
to  form  even  an  imagination.  The  wise 
men  of  my  own  country  declare  that  that 
other  world  is  populated  to  the  very  full 
with  spirits,  organised  into  hierarchies, 
good  and  evil :  angels,  principalities, 
powers  ;  that  there,  in  that  world  beyond 
the  range  of  our  present  faculties,  the 
agents  of  all  things  blend  and  contend, 
and  that  the  events  that  take  place  on 
the  public  stage  of  life  are  but  the  visible 
76 


If  God  be  for  Us 


signs  of  the  eternal  conflict  in  the  world 
of  spirits. 

And  how  shall  the  frail  barque  of  my 
affrighted  spirit  sail  upon  the  waters  of 
such  a  raging  sea  ?  Ah  well,  concerning 
all  this  I  am  in  total  ignorance.  I  do  not 
know  even  a  little  ;  and  I  praise  God  that 
this  is  my  condition.  For  if  I  knew  even 
a  little  I  should  be  thinking  too  much 
about  it,  and  how  little  it  was  compared 
with  the  necessities  of  the  case.  Whereas 
I  know  nothing  about  this  place  to  which 
I  am  going.  I  see  now  that  for  the  lovers 
of  Christ,  dying  is  the  last  act  of  faith. 
For  what  is  faith  but  a  reliance  upon 
something  which  we  do  know,  and  upon 
that  reliance  setting  out  with  a  kind  of 
innocence  towards  something  which  we 
do  not  know  ? 

Once  again,  I  do  not  know  in  what 
way  my  soul  shall  acquit  itself  in  that 
unexperienced  climate  ;  but  I  know  that 
if  God  be  for  us  there  also  it  will  be 
well  with  me.  To  the  question,  therefore, 
which   I  asked   myself — "  A  man  giveth 

77 


If  God  be  for  Us 


up  the  ghost,  and  where  is  he  ?  " — I  make 
this  simple  answer.  There  in  that  un- 
trodden world,  a  man  is  where  he  was  ; 
he  is  where,  with  his  deepest  spirit,  he 
always  wished  to  be.  If  Christ  is  with 
him  here,  Christ  will  be  with  him  there, 
but  closer.  He  will  call,  and  I  will  answer 
Him.  He  will  have  a  desire  to  the  work 
of  His  hands.  Shall  the  world  of  crowding 
spirits,  shall  the  cold  immensity  of  space, 
the  height  and  the  depth — shall  these 
separate  us  from  the  love  of  God  which  is 
in  Christ  Jesus,  our  Lord  ?     Nay  : 

*'  Fear  death  ? — to  feel  the  fog  in  my  throat, 

The  mist  in  my  face. 
When  the  snows  begin,  and  the  blasts  denote 

I  am  nearing  the  place, 
The  power  of  the  night,  the  press  of  the  storm. 

The  post  of  the  foe  : 
**  Where  he  stands,  the  Arch  Fear  in  a  visible  form. 

Yet  the  strong  man  must  go. 
For  the  journey  is  done  and  the  summit  attained. 

And  the  barriers  fall, 
"  Though  a  battle's  to  fight  ere  the  guerdon  be  gained, 

The  reward  of  it  all. 
I  was  ever  a  fighter,  so — one  fight  more. 

The  best  and  the  last  ! 
I  would  hate  that  death  bandaged  my  eyes  and  forbore, 

And  bade  me  creep  past. 

78 


If  God  be  for  Us 


No  !  let  me  taste  the  whole  of  it,  fare  hke  my  peers 

The  heroes  of  old. 
Bear  the  brunt,  in  a  minute  pay  glad  life's  arrears 

Of  pain,  darkness,  and  cold. 
For  sudden  the  worst  turns  the  best  to  the  brave. 

The  black  minute's  at  end, 
"  And  the  elements'  rage,  the  fiend- voices  that  rave, 

Shall  dwindle,  shall  blend. 
Shall  change,  shall  become  first  a  piece  out  of  pain. 

Then  a  light,  then  thy  breast, 
O  thou  soul  of  my  soul !  I  shall  clasp  thee  again. 

And  with  God  be  the  rest  !  " 

A  good  way  of  testing  the  calibre  of  a 
philosophy  is  to  ask  what  it  makes  of 
death.  Philosophy,  said  Plato,  is  a  medi- 
tation upon  death,  or  rather  it  is  the 
striving  of  the  soul  to  escape  from  the 
conclusion  to  which  death  seems  to  point, 
to  recover  from  the  affront  and  insinua- 
tion which  death  seems  to  offer.  Perhaps 
we  might  quite  properly  trace  all  the 
greatness  of  the  human  soul  to  its  brave 
struggle  through  all  ages  with  the  thought 
and  prospect  of  death.  We  ought  to 
remember  that  great  service  which  the 
fact  of  death  has  rendered  man  :  that 
it  has  compelled  him  to  struggle  towards 
some  point  of  view  from  which  he  could  see 

79 


If  God  be  for  Us 


through  death  and  over  it.  What  are  all 
the  outpourings  of  the  spirit  of  man — in 
his  art,  his  poetry,  his  worship — but  so 
many  ways  of  fortifying  himself  against 
the  disheartening  thought  of  death  ? 

We  can  conceive  of  a  life  without  the 
shadow  of  death,  but  in  our  own  best 
moments  we  perceive  that  it  would  have 
been  a  poorer  life  than  the  tragic,  poignant 
life  we  know  ;  for  in  the  long  run  it  would 
have  been  a  life  without  music,  without 
hymns,  without  prayers,  without  tender- 
ness, without  mercy,  without  the  qualify- 
ing presence  of  a  great  fear.  Ultimately, 
it  would  have  been  a  world  without  God. 
No  :  whatever  hard  things  we  may  say 
about  death,  we  owe  to  it,  under  God, 
our  true  possessions.  Death  is  no  mere 
thief  in  the  night.  In  tender,  right-living 
souls,  he  leaves  more  than  he  takes  away. 
What  an  instrument  for  deepening  the 
soul  is  death !  What  a  medicine  for 
taking  the  fever  from  our  life  !  How  much 
we  should  be  to  one  another,  who  are  one 
day  to  lose  one  another  !  How  expedient 
80 


If  God  be  for  Us 


it  is  for  us  that  they  whom  we  love  should 
go  away !  For  there  are  things  about 
them  and  about  ourselves  and  about  God 
which  we  should  never  have  known  if 
our  hearts  had  never  been  torn  by  a 
separation  and  enlarged. 

Speaking  for  myself,  I  cannot  follow 
those  who  make  light  of  death,  who  regard 
all  mourning  and  fear  as  unsuitable  to 
Christians,  and  who  even  go  so  far  as  to 
praise  death.  I  cannot  follow  them  in 
such  an  attitude.  To  me  death  is  the 
enemy,  the  last  enemy.  And  I  am  sure 
that  God  means  me  to  defend  myself 
against  it,  and  to  shrink  from  it.  It  is  in 
obedience  to  God's  own  ordinance  that 
we  should  love  and  cling  to  life.  The 
grave  is  still  made  formidable  by  fear 
and  silence,  lest  any  one  should  hurry 
out  of  this  world  before  his  work  is  done, 
before  the  season  of  his  opportunity  is 
closed. 

**  To  be,  or  not  to  be, — that  is  the  question  : 
Whether  'tis  nobler  in  the  mind  to  suffer 
The  slings  and  arrows  of  outrageous  fortune. 
Or  to  take  arms  against  a  sea  of  troubles, 

G  81 


If  God  be  for  Us 


And  by  opposing  end  them  ?     To  die, — to  sleep  ; 

No  more  ;  and  by  a  sleep  to  say  we  end 

The  heart-ache  and  the  thousand  natural  shocks 

That  flesh  is  heir  to, — 'tis  a  consummation 

Devoutly  to  be  wished.     To  die, — to  sleep, — 

To  sleep  !  perchance  to  dream  : — aye,  there's  the  rub 

For  in  that  sleep  of  death  what  dreams  may  come 

When  we  have  shuffled  off  this  mortal  coil. 

Must  give  us  pause  ;  there's  the  respect 

That  makes  calamity  of  so  long  life  ; 

For  who  would  bear  the  whips  and  scorns  of  time. 

The  oppressor's  wrong,  the  proud  man's  contumely. 

The  pangs  of  despised  love,  the  law's  delay. 

The  insolence  of  office,  and  the  spurns 

That  patient  merit  of  the  unworthy  takes. 

When  he  himself  might  his  quietus  make 

With  a  bare  bodkin  ?     Who  would  fardels  bear. 

To  grunt  and  sweat  under  a  weary  life. 

But  that  the  dread  of  something  after  death. 

The  undiscover'd  coimtry,  from  whose  bourn 

No  traveller  returns,  puzzles  the  will. 

And  makes  us  rather  bear  those  ills  we  have 

Than  fly  to  others  that  we  know  not  of  ? 

Thus  conscience  does  make  cowards  of  us  all ; 

And  thus  the  native  hue  of  resolution 

Is  sicklied  o'er  with  the  pale  cast  of  thought ; 

And  enterprises  of  great  pith  and  moment, 

With  this  regard  their  currents  turn  awry. 

And  lose  the  name  of  action." — Hamlet  iii.  1. 

I  trust  indeed  that  when  the  hour  of  my 

necessity  comes  Christ  will  give  me  the 

victory  over  my   instinctive  fear,    saving 

me   from   panic    and    cowardice.     But    I 

82 


If  God  be  for  Us 


have  no  expectation  that  it  will  be  for 
me  anything  short  of  a  victory  :  that  is, 
it  will  come  to  me  only  by  way  of  a 
struggle,  by  way  of  faith.  Any  way  of 
considering  the  end  of  our  mortal  life 
which  is  merely  enthusiastic  and  contemp- 
tuous fails  in  the  long  run  to  solace  the 
heart  of  man.  We  say  :  those  who  speak 
thus  have  simply  not  felt  what  we  feel : 
they  do  not  understand  ;  perhaps  they 
are  to  be  envied  ;  but  again  perhaps  they 
are  not  to  be  envied. 

The  human  soul  has  found  its  strength 
for  the  last  encounter,  not  in  the  experi- 
ence or  testimony  of  those  who  have  anti- 
cipated an  easy  crossing  of  the  River ; 
but  in  the  experience  and  testimony  of 
those  who  anticipated  that  for  them  the 
River  would  be  swollen  and  in  flood.  Now 
St.  Paul  affects  me,  recalling  his  writings 
at  this  moment,  as  one  to  whom  the 
victory  over  death  was  no  easy  achieve- 
ment. He  affects  me,  therefore,  as  a 
normal  man  with  the  natural  shrinkings 
and  cravings  of  a  man,  one  who  had  to 

83 


If  God  be  for  Us 


wrestle  with  this  enemy  until  the  breaking 
of  the  day. 

In  some  ways,  victory  over  death  was 
an  easier  thing  for  him  than  it  may  be  for 
us ;  although  the  circumstances  which 
make  the  struggle  a  harder  one  for  us 
are  circumstances  for  which  we  ourselves 
are  responsible,  and  for  which,  since  we  de- 
plore them,  we  are  to  be  blamed.  For  one 
thing,  the  unseen  world  was  a  manifest 
reality  to  him.  The  supernatural  for  him 
was  not  a  difficult  faith  which  he  had 
to  defend  by  argument.  The  super- 
natural to  him  was  his  habitual  experi- 
ence, to  which  he  had  been  introduced  by 
a  fact  in  his  own  life.  However  near  to 
his  experience  it  may  please  God  to  bring 
us,  it  will  probably  always  be  something 
less  vivid  and  objective  than  that  appear- 
ance of  the  Risen  Lord  which  struck  Paul 
to  the  earth.  It  is  true  we  have,  or  we 
ought  to  have,  evidences  of  the  super- 
natural which  were  not  available  for  Paul ; 
— for  example,  from  the  subsequent  his- 
tory of  Christ  in  the  world.  But  encoun- 
84 


If  God  be  for  Us 


tered  as  we  are  by  other  interpretations, 
probably  no  evidence  of  the  Reality  of 
the  Unseen  and  of  the  actualness  of 
Christ's  supernatural  power  has  been  given 
to  us,  having  the  physical  cogency  of  the 
facts  which  convinced  him. 

There  are  days  when  we  wish  it  were 
otherwise,  when  we  fain  would  have  from 
God  an  open  sign.  But  we  confess  that 
in  such  a  petition  we  are  asking  for  a 
lower  gift ;  we  are  asking  to  see  rather 
than  to  believe,  thereby  refusing  for 
ourselves  Christ's  last  beatitude.  (St. 
John  XX.  29.)  And  then  it  must  have 
given  the  Apostle  great  confidence,  face 
to  face  with  death,  to  see  how  Christians 
could  die.  He  had  seen  Stephen  sink 
down  in  death,  his  face  like  the  face  of 
an  angel.  He  had  seen  Christ  not  separ- 
ated by  death  from  those  who  loved  Him. 
He  could  promise  himself  the  succour  of 
the  Lord  at  the  last,  for  he  had  never  seen 
that  succour  fail. 

And  there  I  should  like  to  interrupt 
myself  for  a  moment.    Nothing  will  ever 

85 


If  God  be  for  Us 


sustain  us  in  our  preaching  as  will  a 
sympathetic  contact  with  our  fellow- 
Christians  in  their  bearing  of  sorrows  and 
in  their  enduring  of  death.  I  am  sure 
preaching  suffers  to-day  from  the  absence 
of  that  conviction  about  the  nearness 
and  reality  of  Christ  such  as  is  fed  by  the 
actual  sight  of  suffering  and  death  borne 
beautifully  in  the  grace  of  Him  whom  we 
preach.  It  may  be  that  we  are  not 
invited  or  even  permitted  to  minister  to 
our  people  in  their  bodily  distresses,  as 
was  wont  to  be  the  case.  Perhaps  our 
sick  people,  especially  those  who  are 
seriously  ill,  are  being  wrongfully  de- 
prived of  the  society  and  the  spoken  in- 
tercessions of  those  who  share  with  them 
the  Christian  hope.  Perhaps  medical  men 
have  gone  too  far  in  the  exclusively 
material  treatment  of  human  maladies — 
thereby  provoking  the  equally  false  exag- 
geration, say,  of  Christian  Science.  Un- 
less the  restriction  is  released,  it  may 
even  be  our  duty  to  draw  the  attention 
of  our  people  to  a  practice  which  is 
86 


If  God  be  for  Us 


based  upon  a  most  defective  and  irre- 
ligious interpretation  of  their  nature  and 
necessities. 

But  that  is  not  my  concern  at  this 
moment.  My  concern  is  for  the  loss  to 
the  public  teachers  of  the  Faith  from 
that  inexperience  of  Christ's  supernatural 
power,  which  follows  from  having  few  if 
any  opportunities  of  seeing,  in  those  who 
lie  on  a  sick-bed,  the  visible  response  of 
Christ  to  our  intercessions.  For  myself,  I 
do  not  know  to  what  further  thinness  and 
emptiness  and  mere  talkativeness  and 
unreality  my  own  testimony  for  Christ 
might  have  fallen,  had  I  not  during  the 
first  six  years  of  my  ministry  gone  in 
and  out  among  the  homes  of  unsophisti- 
cated people, — who  would  have  protested 
against  being  allowed  to  suffer  and  to 
draw  near  to  the  end  of  life  without  the 
guidance  and  comfort  of  God's  Word — 
and  seen  there  on  many  a  face  which  I 
can  still  recall  the  manifest  Presence  of 
Christ,  giving  victory  and  reconciliation 
and  peace  in  circumstances  which,  apart 

87 


If  God  be  for  Us 


from  Him,  made  for  sheer  heart-breaking 
confusion. 

I  am  sorry  for  any  of  my  brethren  who 
must  go  on  talking  and  talking  about 
Christ,  who  have  never  seen  and  who 
never  see  the  Christ  whom  they  are 
talking  about  in  action. 

My  point  was  that  Paul  could  ask, 
"  Shall  death  separate  us  from  Christ  ?  " 
And  could  answer,  No,  indeed ;  for,  to  say 
no  more,  he  had  seen  men  fall  asleep  in 
Christ. 

Shall  death  separate  us  from  Christ  ? 
he  asks :  and  swift  upon  that  comes 
another  challenge, — shall  life  ? 

If  we  were  always  true  to  what  we  know 
about  ourselves  in  our  own  best  hours, 
we  should  be  more  afraid  of  life  than  of 
death  ;  in  the  sense,  I  mean,  that  we 
should  be  more  on  guard  against  the  ten- 
dency of  life  to  separate  us  from  Christ 
and  to  interrupt  the  highest  Communions 
of  the  Spirit.  Whatever  hard  things  we 
may  say  about  death  as  it  appears  when 
88 


If  God  be  for  Us 


it  comes  close  to  ourselves,  one  thing  we 
cannot  deny  ;  it  brings  us  face  to  face 
with  reality.  Death  delivers  us  from  the 
confusion  and  incubus  of  a  thousand 
petty  cares.  The  very  thought  of  death 
draws  in  the  slackness  of  our  souls,  and 
puts  us  upon  the  strain,  making  us,  it 
may  be  for  the  first  time,  capable  of 
responding  to  the  holier  prospects  and  re- 
quirements. The  shadow  of  death  takes 
all  commonness  out  of  the  soul.  One 
perceives  a  kind  of  aristocracy  in  the 
bearing  and  in  the  tone  of  voice  of  one 
who  has  been  deeply  bereaved.  And  it 
is  an  old  observation  that  a  certain  king- 
liness  of  aspect  descends  upon  the  faces 
of  the  dead  :  so  that  we  who  are  still 
alive  acknowledge  that  something  has 
come  to  them  which  makes  us  inferior. 

Far  from  death  and  the  things  which 
accompany  death  separating  us  from  that 
world  which  lies  beyond  our  sense-experi- 
ence, nothing  has  such  power  to  purify 
the  soul  and  fill  the  empty  space  with  God. 
Jacob  and  Esau,  two  brothers,  separated 

89 


If  God  be  for  Us 


for  long  years,  the  heart  of  the  one  bitter 
for  revenge,  the  heart  of  the  other  trem- 
bling with  fear — Jacob  and  Esau,  coming 
together  again  in  friendliness  over  their 
father's  grave,  helping  each  other  to  lay 
the  old  man's  body  in  its  last  resting-place  : 
that  is  a  parable  of  the  proper  function 
of  death  in  life. 

"  O  earth,  so  full  of  dreary  noises  ! 
O  men  with  wailing  in  your  voices  ! 
O  delved  gold,  the  wailers  heap  ! 
O  strife,  O  curse,  that  o'er  it  fall ! 
God  strikes  a  silence  through  you  all, 
And  giveth  His  beloved  sleep." 

We  cannot  say  whether  it  was  such  an 
idea  that  flashed  through  the  mind  of  St. 
Paul  as  he  poured  himself  out  in  this 
passage,  the  idea  that  the  thing  which  we 
are  to  be  on  guard  against,  as  having  the 
greater  power  to  alienate  our  soul  from  its 
greatness,  is  not  death,  but  life.  We 
cannot  say  that  that  is  what  he  intended  : 
but  on  the  other  hand,  we  cannot  say  that 
he  did  not  intend  that.  Great  words, 
deep  words,  words  that  rise  out  of  the 
depths  of  a  whole  life,  always  convey  more 
90 


If  God  be  for  Us 


than  their  first  or  precise  meaning.  They 
mean  everything  that  they  may  mean  to 
hearts  which  have  come  within  sight  of 
their  depth. 

Certain  it  is  that  it  is  not  the  deep 
things  of  human  experience,  but  the  shal- 
low things  which  have  the  most  disastrous 
influence  upon  the  soul.  All  through 
his  long  career,  man  on  the  whole  has 
borne  honourably  the  inevitable  facts,  he 
has  found  within  himself  and  in  God 
resources  with  which  to  quieten  himself 
in  prospect  of  his  own  departure  from 
this  world.  This  may  have  happened  to 
him  because,  confronted  with  something 
which,  like  death,  is  inevitable,  he  has 
ceased  even  to  try  to  sustain  himself, 
whereupon,  leaning  back  in  his  weakness, 
he  has  come  upon  some  hidden  allevia- 
tion of  nature  or,  as  we  should  state  the 
matter  in  our  warmer  and  more  logical 
speech,  he  has  come  upon  the  Everlasting 
Arms  of  God. 

Certainly  it  is  a  fact  worth  pondering 
that  we  all  of  us  do  better  face  to  face 

91 


If  God  be  for  Us 


with  the  big  things  than  with  the  Uttle 
things.  We  are  greater  when  we  bend 
under  a  burden  than  when  we  are  still 
quarrelling  with  some  mere  care.  Thus 
it  often  happens  that  we  are  most  thor- 
oughly made  free  from  cares,  not  by  a 
wind  from  God  cleansing  our  sky,  but  by 
a  wind  from  God  filling  our  sky  with 
overhanging,  thunderous,  electric  clouds, 
beneath  which  the  cares  that  a  moment 
before  had  seemed  so  important  hide 
themselves  in  a  kind  of  shame.  A  drown- 
ing man  is  not  aware  that  he  is  getting 
wet ;  for  when  a  man  is  getting  wet,  it 
is  his  comfort  that  is  being  invaded, 
whereas  in  drowning  a  man  is  fighting 
for  his  life.  We  might  go  so  far  as  to 
say  that  the  only  remedy  for  the  smaller 
evils  of  existence  is  to  feel,  in  fact  or 
in  imagination,  the  threat  of  some  deeper 
and  more  ultimate  evil. 

There  is  more  danger  of  atheism  in  the 

management  of  the  little  things  of  life 

than    in    the    management    of    the    deep 

things.     In  the  management  of  the  smaller 

92 


If  God  be  for  Us 


things,  we  imagine  that  we  are  sufficient 
for  ourselves  ;  and  therefore,  we  become 
harassed,  moody,  liable  to  a  thousand 
fears ;  whereas,  in  presence  of  the  great 
things,  the  inevitable  things,  the  ultimate 
human  things  of  life  and  death,  we  know 
and  we  acknowledge  that  we  are  not  suffi- 
cient, that  unless  God  be  with  us,  there 
is  no  hope  ;  and  in  such  a  moment,  before 
we  know  where  we  are,  the  soul  within 
us,  which  is  always  ready  to  go  further 
than  the  strict  evidence,  has  already 
reached  the  heart  of  the  whole  matter, 
declaring  to  itself  that  if  God  be  with  us, 
all  is  well. 

But  the  question,  "  Shall  life  separate 
us  from  the  love  of  Christ  ?  "  must  have 
had  for  Christians  of  the  first  century  a 
quite  definite  meaning  and  one  quite  free 
from  subtilty  or  over-refinement.  Let 
me  try  to  say  what  I  think  the  meaning 
would  be  for  those  who  first  heard  these 
glowing  words.  One  day,  as  we  are  going 
about  at  our  work,  or  travelling,  or  look- 
ing out  of  our  window  in  an  idle  moment, 

93 


If  God  be  for  Us 


our  eye  may  fall  upon  some  one  doing 
something  which  is  evidently  his  daily 
occupation  ;  and  we  suddenly  ask  our- 
selves how  is  it  possible  for  any  one,  who 
must  do  such  a  thing  day  in  and  day  out, 
year  in  and  year  out,  to  keep  his  soul 
alive.  For  it  sometimes  comes  home  to 
us,  with  a  force  which  brings  us  to  a 
standstill,  on  what  innumerable  lives  of 
obscure  monotony — to  say  no  more — the 
fabric  of  our  own  personal  comfort  is  sus- 
tained !  And  no  good  man  will  permit 
himself  to  escape  from  that  moral  uneasi- 
ness until  he  has  convinced  himself,  first, 
that  he  honours  those  nameless  victims 
of  civilisation,  and,  second,  that  he  also 
is  doing  something  with  the  spirit  of  the 
Cross  in  it. 

I  say,  a  day  comes  when  our  eye  falls 
upon  some  person,  meanly  engaged,  occu- 
pied in  some  task  for  the  sake  of  his  or 
her  livelihood,  so  exacting,  or  so  petty 
and  so  monotonous,  that  we  wonder  how 
any  flower  of  the  spirit,  of  the  imagina-tion 
and  affections,  can  bud  or  blossom  on  such 

94 


If  God  be  for  Us 


a  soil  and  in  such  sunlessness.  Some 
time  ago  I  was  passing  through  a  huge 
factory,  and  there,  amidst  heat  and  the 
clanging  of  machinery,  I  saw  a  man  punch- 
ing holes  with  a  hammer.  Stroke  upon 
stroke,  stroke  upon  stroke,  his  arm  rose 
and  fell.  I  watched  him  for  some  time, 
but  there  was  no  variation,  no  need,  it 
would  appear,  for  any  further  mental 
resource  on  his  part.  That  is  his  work  by 
the  hour  and  the  day  and  the  year — 
until,  I  suppose,  his  hand  becomes  faulty, 
and  he  has  to  stand  aside.  I  know  it  is  a 
very  mild  illustration  of  the  kind  of  life 
that  countless  thousands  must  meanwhile 
lead. 

Here  and  always,  we  mvist  of  course 
remember  that  the  heart  knoweth  its  own 
joy,  as  well  as  its  own  sore  ;  and  one 
who  merely  looks  on  is  disqualified  from 
pronouncing  on  the  things  that  may  be 
happening  beneath  the  surface  in  any 
other  life.  We  must  take  care  lest  our 
pity  for  our  fellow-men  become  really 
disrespect    and    contempt    for    the    soul 

95 


If  God  be  for  Us 


within  them.  It  may  very  well  be  that 
the  life  which  we  lead  in  the  world  is 
quite  as  hardening,  quite  as  ruinous  to 
the  imagination  and  spirit,  quite  as  piti- 
able from  the  standpoint  of  the  soul,  as 
that  other's  work  which  we  shrink  from 
because  it  is  mean  and  haunted  by  poverty. 
Indeed,  we  must  take  care,  in  our  expres- 
sions of  idle  pity,  that  we  do  not  simply 
betray  our  own  essential  worldliness, 
speaking  as  though  happiness  and  the 
life  of  the  soul  were  altogether  dependent 
upon  material  conditions,  denying  to  a 
human  being  the  power  to  transform  and 
triumph  over  conditions  by  the  force  and 
joy  of  his  spirit.  When  you  or  I  feel  a 
wave  of  shame  and  pity  for  the  hard  lot 
of  any  of  our  fellows,  let  us  see  that  it 
is  first  of  all  an  active  passion  and  no 
mere  reaction  of  personal  distaste  and 
self-satisfaction  ;  and  second,  that  it  is 
free  from  the  taint  of  contempt  for  the 
soul  in  others  and  for  its  amazing  and  in- 
exhaustible resources.  For  it  may  very 
well  be  that  there  is  a  point  of  view,  and 
96 


If  God  be  for  Us 


this  nearer  to  the  mind  of  God,  from  which 
things  are  seen  in  a  totally  different  per- 
spective, and  apprized  on  a  totally  differ- 
ent scheme  of  values,  where  those  whom  we 
count  first  are  last  and  those  whom  we 
count  last  are  first. 

It  is  not  to  be  wondered  at,  however, 
that  in  an  age  like  our  own,  so  rich  in 
material  things,  the  sense  of  the  resource 
and  cunning  which  dwell  within  human 
souls  for  finding  always  a  basis  of  joy, 
should  have  almost  died  within  us,  so 
that  our  philanthropy,  and  sometimes  our 
very  religious  interest  in  the  poor  and 
outcast,  is  vitiated  by  a  veiled  contempt 
and  disregard  of  the  soul  within  them  : 
as  though  life,  with  its  merely  external 
conditions,  could  after  all  separate  men 
from  the  love  of  God  which  is  in  Christ 
Jesus  our  Lord.  We  are  all  too  ready  to- 
day to  forget  the  power  of  love,  of  affection, 
of  imagination,  of  moral  ambition,  of 
faith,  of  prayer,  to  pierce  the  gloom  and 
monotony  of  circumstance  and  to  recover 
for  life  that  soul  on  which,  through  all  the 
H  97 


If  God  be  for  Us 


ages,  man  has  mounted  up  on  wings,  or 
has  run  without  weariness,  or,  in  the 
steepest  places,  has  walked  without  faint- 
ing by  the  way. 

Still,  when  all  is  said,  there  are  certain 
conditions  which  more  than  others  dis- 
pose such  as  are  under  them  to  think  in 
a  mean  way  about  themselves  and  to  lose 
heart.  There  are  always  those — and  in 
a  complicated  and  heedless  civilisation 
they  must  be  a  great  host — ^who,  unless 
they  have  an  exquisite  faith,  might  well 
suppose  that  life,  the  kind  of  life  they 
must  daily  lead,  had  cut  them  off  or  was 
slowly  shutting  them  out  from  any  free- 
dom of  the  spirit,  from  any  personal 
initiative  or  high  communion.  And  indeed, 
apart  from  our  faith  that  we  have  a 
private  life  within  the  love  of  God,  apart 
from  our  faith  that  God  cares  for  us  one 
by  one,  with  all  that  that  implies  and 
shall  lead  to,  what  are  we  better  any  of  us 
than  so  many  conscript  soldiers,  so  many 
victims  and  prisoners  of  life  !  But  this 
was  a  thought  which  might  with  much 

98 


If  God  be  for  Us 


reason  come  over  the  minds  of  the  first 
Christians.  They  were  for  the  most  part 
slaves.  All  the  old  civilisations  rested 
upon  a  basis  of  slavery. 

Now  the  thing  that  makes  slavery  in- 
tolerable to  Christian  minds  is  not  simply 
the  physical  hardship  that  accompanies 
it.  What  makes  slavery, — and  if  the 
same  can  be  said  of  any  existing  social 
arrangement,  then  it  also  is  contrary  to 
the  mind  of  Christ,  and  must  go, — what 
makes  slavery  obnoxious  to  Christian 
minds  is  that  it  disposes  its  victims  to 
accept  as  the  truth  their  own  sense  of 
worthlessness. 

But  what  had  those  first  Christians 
wherewith  to  overcome  within  themselves 
this  sense  of  worthlessness  ?  They  had 
the  wonderful  knowledge  that  Jesus  Christ 
had  thought  them  worthy.  He  had  given 
Himself  for  them.  We  cannot  to-day 
even  imagine  the  thrill  of  self-respect,  of 
self-recovery,  which  would  run  through 
their  veins  like  fire  to  read  or  to  hear 
such  words  as  "  Who  being  in  the  form 

99 


If  God  be  for  Us 


of  God  .  .  .  humbled  Himself  and  took 
upon  Himself  the  form  of  a  slave. '^ 

Shall  life  separate  us  from  the  love  of 
Christ  ?  Shall  it  put  us  away  from  Christ 
that  we  are  poor  ?  For  our  sakes,  He 
became  poor,  that  we  through  His  poverty- 
might  become  rich  !  Nay,  then,  far  from 
life,  our  life — so  poor,  so  friendless,  so 
difficult,  so  obscure — far  from  our  life 
separating  us  from  the  love  of  God,  what 
if  the  truth  rather  be  that  it  is  just  such 
a  life  as  ours,  and  only  such  a  life  in 
spirit,  that  can  maintain  within  souls  the 
tenderness  and  humility  and  passion  of 
necessity  which  unite  us  to  our  Blessed 
Lord  in  faith  and  hope  and  love  ! 


100 


Chapter  V 


"  Nor  angels,  nor  principalities,  nor  things  present, 
nor  things  to  come,  nor  powers." 


Chapter   V 


In  dealing  with  words  Uke  these,  words 
which  are  unusual,  words  which  embody 
ideas  that  are  strange  to  us,  it  will  help 
us  towards  the  true  understanding  of 
them  to  remember,  once  again,  that  it  was 
always  a  serious  thing  to  live.  It  will 
help  us  also  to  remember  that  anything 
which  was  ever  passionately  believed  con- 
tains an  abiding  truth  ;  it  was  an  attempt, 
affected,  of  course,  by  the  limits  of  human 
knowledge  at  the  time,  to  account  for 
matters  which  are  probably  quite  as 
mysterious  to  ourselves,  matters  for  which 
our  explanation  may  appear  equally 
strange  and  unenlightened  to  those  who 
come  after  us.  Anything  that  was  ever 
heartily  and  persistently  believed  repre- 
sents, we  may  be  sure,  a  way  of  looking 
at  some  mystery  of  life  or  of  thought 
which  at  one  time  helped  people  to  bring 

103 


If  God  be  for  Us 


some  kind  of  order  into  the  world,  so  that 
they  might  feel  more  or  less  at  home  in  it. 

We  are  "  dwellers  in  tents,"  not  merely 
from  the  point  of  view  of  our  physical 
life  passing  through  youth  and  manhood 
and  decay  to  what  lies  beyond  all  experi- 
ence ;  we  are  dwellers  in  tents  in  matters 
of  the  soul,  in  matters  of  knowledge,  of 
thought,  and  in  the  region  of  ideas.  But 
this  is  not  to  say  that  because  one  set  of 
ideas  comes  to  be  forsaken  for  another, 
which  in  turn  becomes  obsolete,  therefore 
all  are  equally  false.  For  a  serious  and 
sympathetic  student  of  history,  it  should 
rather  mean  that  through  all  time  man 
has  found  himself  confronted  with  a  world 
which  he  has  insisted  upon  understanding, 
a  world  which  he  has  girded  up  the  loins 
of  his  mind  to  meet  and  master  by  virtue 
of  his  own  quality. 

At  each  stage  the  interpretation  arrived 
at  may  have  been  defective,  or  in  the 
light  of  later  knowledge  false,  though 
false  is  too  strong  a  word  for  any  theory 
of  things  which  in  its  day  represented 
104 


If  God  be  for  Us 


the  highest  and  most  serious  effort  of  the 
human  mind.  At  each  stage,  I  say,  the 
interpretation  which  served  for  the  time 
being  may  have  been  inadequate,  or,  to 
the  wiser  minds  which  were  being  formed, 
even  fooUsh,  but  though  the  interpreta- 
tion may  have  been  wrong,  the  instinct 
to  seek  an  interpretation  was  right,  and 
its  persistence  is  one  of  the  precious 
evidences  of  man's  distinction. 

And  again,  though  this  interpretation 
and  that  may  have  been  wrong,  inade- 
quate, quaint,  foolish,  this  is  not  to  say 
that  there  was  not  all  the  time  something 
that  required  an  interpretation.  It  may 
be  that  this  gnostic  account  of  the  cos- 
mical  process,  for  example,  which  ascribes 
to  hierarchies  of  spirits  the  creation  and 
control  of  things,  can  no  longer  satisfy 
our  reason  or  our  moral  sense.  But  when 
we  have  discarded  the  gnostic  account, 
we  have  not  thereby  taken  any  positive 
step  towards  the  solution  of  the  mysteries 
which  that  account  attempted  to  relieve. 
We  may,  of  course,  content  ourselves 
105 


If  God  be  for  Us 


with  an  agnostic  attitude,  and  say  that 
the  entire  matter  is  beyond  us,  that  we 
are  quite  incompetent  for  absolute  truth, 
that  we  had  better  mind  our  own  busi- 
ness, that  nobody  knows  anything,  or  can 
ever  know  anything  ; — and  so  on. 

But  such  an  attitude,  we  must  confess, 
is  less  worthy  than  theirs  who  at  least 
did  believe  that  the  human  mind  was  not 
incapable  of  finding  truth,  who,  without 
saying  it  in  so  many  words,  did  by  their 
thinking  claim  that  man  stands  in  an 
organic  relation  to  all  things  and  to  the 
absolute  God  and  to  all  intervening  and 
mediating  spirits  and  principles.  That,  I 
say,  is  a  nobler  attitude  than  to  give  up 
all  thinking  ;  for  to  give  up  thinking  in 
any  ultimate  way  about  this  life  of  ours, 
and  to  devote  ourselves  to  our  own  petty 
and  ever-contracting  circle  of  interests, 
resembles  rather  the  alleged  delusion  of 
the  ostrich  when  it  buries  its  head  in  the 
sand  and  supposes  it  is  safe. 

Throughout   the   New   Testament   one 
encounters  in   every   page   references  to 
106 


If  God  be  for  Us 


what  would  appear  to  have  been  a  more 
or  less  accepted  body  of  ideas,  imagina- 
tions, beliefs  with  regard  to  the  presence 
in  this  world  and  over  it  of  demonic  or 
angelic,  immaterial  forces  and  powers. 
These  references  when  they  do  occur 
affect  us  as  arising  out  of  a  traditional 
basis  and  doctrine  of  existence,  such  as 
the  writer  or  speaker  could  assume  as 
present. 

At  the  stage  of  spiritual  development 
which  has  been  reached  at  the  close  of  the 
Canon,  there  is  no  distinct  repudiation  by 
the  Church  of  the  general  outlines  of 
that  cosmogony.  In  this,  as  always,  the 
Bible  is  not  a  book  of  philosophy.  It  is 
willing  to  begin  with  men  as  they  are, 
content  that  they  embrace  the  living 
truth  concerning  God  as  that  is  revealed 
from  age  to  age,  leaving  it  to  themselves, 
to  their  sense  of  honour  towards  God,  to 
amend,  adjust,  or  abandon  such  thought- 
systems  and  life-systems  as  they  have 
been  living  by,  according  as  these  systems 
betray  under  the  new  light  any  embarrass- 
J07 


If  God  be  for  Us 


ment  or  hostility.  Just  as  the  one  interest 
of  nature  is  life,  and  for  the  sake  of  life 
she  will  allow  types  and  species  to  perish, 
so  the  one  interest  of  God  in  history  is 
the  advance  and  refinement  and  freedom 
of  the  spirit,  and  for  the  sake  of  that 
God  will  permit  the  overthrow  of  every 
institution  of  man,  as  a  thinking  being, 
in  doctrines,  and  as  a  social  being,  in 
laws,  when  those  doctrines  or  laws  have 
become  intolerable  to  the  demand  and 
requirement  of  life. 

The  function  of  the  Spirit  of  God  in  Holy 
Writ  is  to  keep  pouring  in  the  new  wine  ; 
it  is  no  part  of  His  function  to  manufac- 
ture the  wine-skins.  It  is  left  to  us, 
using  our  good  sense,  our  sober  judgment, 
exercising  also  from  time  to  time  a 
certain  fearlessness,  and  that  willingness 
to  take  a  risk  which  is  such  a  true  part 
of  our  nature,  it  is  left  to  us,  when  an 
old  wine-skin  can  no  longer  contain  the 
precious  wine — when,  it  may  be,  the  old 
wine-skin  is  beginning  to  taint  and  dis- 
qualify the  wine — ^to  prepare  new  skins, 
108 


If  God  be  for  Us 


new  habitations  of  the  spirit,  new  thought- 
systems  and  Ufe-sy stems,  lest  the  wine  of 
God  be  lost  to  us  and  we  are  left  with  only 
the  old  skin,  with  but  the  memory  of  the 
days  when  it  was  full. 

Throughout  the  New  Testament,  I  say, 
we  see  cropping  out,  like  rock  above  the 
soil,  a  whole  system  of  beliefs  with  regard 
to  the  immaterial  nature  of  things.  I 
think  it  is  fair  to  say  that  nowhere  in  the 
New  Testament  is  there  any  thorough- 
going repudiation  of  the  habitual  beliefs 
of  the  people.  Again  and  again,  very 
deliberately  in  the  Colossian  Epistle, 
believers  are  put  upon  their  guard  against 
the  dangers  of  these  demonic  or  angelic 
or  spiritualistic  theories,  and  are  charged 
to  abandon  without  the  slightest  hesita- 
tion any  habit  of  thought  or  of  imagina- 
tion which  appears  to  be  in  conflict  with 
the  moral  majesty  of  God,  and  with  the 
Immediate  and  Sovereign  rights  of  Christ. 
But  here,  as  always,  the  line  which  Christ 
takes  is  first  of  all  to  knock  at  the  door 
of  a  man's  heart.  If  the  door  is  heartily 
109 


If  God  be  for  Us 


opened  and  Christ  is  made  welcome,  He 
will  come  in  and  sup  with  the  man.  He 
will  come  in,  that  is  to  say,  and  make 
Himself  at  home  with  the  man,  sharing 
his  daily,  habitual  life  with  him.  But 
Christ  on  the  whole  leaves  it  to  the  man 
into  whose  life  He  has  come,  himself  to 
say  what  things  are  worthy  to  remain  in 
his  life  in  view  of  the  fact  that  this  Holy 
One  is  now  a  sharer  of  all  his  intimacies. 
On  the  whole,  Christ  leaves  it  to  the  man 
into  whose  life  He  has  come,  to  say  what 
kind  of  thoughts  are  going  to  stay  on 
with  him  as  guests. 

We  have  all  of  us  some  kind  of  philo- 
sophy of  life,  some  kind  of  way  of  looking 
at  things,  and  Christ  does  not  begin  by 
either  approving  it  or  disapproving  it. 
He  begins  by  coming  into  our  life  :  and 
He  leaves  it  to  ourselves  to  act  loyally 
upon  any  sense  of  uneasiness  or  incon- 
gruity which,  under  the  new  light  and  with 
our  new  point  of  view,  we  may  discover 
between  Him  and  the  things  we  used  to 
think,  or  used  to  believe,  or  used  to  prac- 
110 


If  God  be  for  Us 


tise.  If  our  old  ways  can  accommodate 
themselves  to  His  wonderful  way,  well 
and  good.  But  if  our  old  ways  begin  to 
jar  upon  some  fine  sense  of  life  which 
Christ  has  given  to  us,  if  things  we  used 
to  do  without  thinking  we  find  ourselves 
now  compelled  to  think  about  and  to 
think  about  very  sadly,  why  then  it  is 
part  of  "  the  manner  of  love  the  Father 
hath  bestowed  upon  us  to  call  us  sons 
of  God,"  that  Christ  trusts  us  to  act 
honourably  by  our  private  sense  of  the 
fitness  and  unfitness  of  those  interior 
arrangements. 

Here  I  cannot  do  better  than  recall  an 
old  story  from  the  Bible  ;  a  story  which 
I  believe  was  preserved  not  simply  as  a 
piece  of  history,  but  as  a  parable  of  the 
method  by  which  God  always  works  and 
makes  His  way.  The  Philistines,  you 
will  remember,  once  upon  a  time  took 
captive  the  Ark  of  the  Lord,  and  placed 
it  in  the  house  of  Dagon,  their  own  god, 
and,  it  would  appear,  even  alongside 
Dagon ;  not  knowing  what  they  did, 
111 


If  God  be  for  Us 


There  they  stood,  those  two, — symbols  of 
the  only  two  ultimate  Spirits,  the  only 
two  Gods  who  finally  and  in  principle 
divide  the  allegiance  of  man.  There  they 
stood,  to  begin  with,  side  by  side.  But 
it  was  only  for  a  moment  that  they  even 
appeared  to  be  at  peace  with  one  another. 
Night  fell,  night  and  darkness,  which  puts 
the  test  to  gods  and  men.  Night  fell, 
and  in  the  darkness,  in  a  region  beyond 
the  eyes  of  men,  the  terrible  struggle 
began.  In  the  morning  Dagon  lay  with 
his  face  to  the  ground,  and  the  Ark  stood 
alone  upon  its  place.  The  Philistines,  sup- 
posing it  had  been  an  accident, — thougli 
Dagon,  so  far  as  we  know,  had  never 
staggered  until  that  day, — set  him  back 
in  his  place  again.  And  the  night  fell : 
and  through  the  darkness  once  again 
those  two  struggled  for  supremacy.  Next 
morning,  Dagon  was  down  again,  and  this 
time  he  had  fallen  with  such  violence 
that  his  head  and  the  palms  of  both 
his  hands  were  broken,  and  nothing 
was  left  to  him  but  his  stump. 
112 


If  God  be  for  Us 


Now  all  that,  I  say,  is  not  merely 
history,  it  is  fact,  it  is  truth.  And  it 
describes  the  way  of  the  living  God 
always.  For  us  in  these  last  days  the 
interpretation  is,  that  Christ  comes  into 
our  life.  In  His  great  love  He  does  not 
ask  before  He  enters  whether  we  are 
worthy  to  receive  Him.  He  comes  in. 
He  sets  Himself  right  down  in  the  midst 
of  all  our  habitual  ways,  leaving  it,  I 
repeat,  to  ourselves  not  to  put  out  our 
hand  to  save  anything  which  at  the  rebuke 
of  Christ  is  beginning  to  totter  from  its 
place  in  our  heart.  If  things  as  they 
were  with  us  before  He  came  can  endure 
His  Presence  happily,  let  them  stay. 
But  if,  without  speaking,  the  Face  of 
Christ  sets  up  within  ourselves  a  distaste 
for  them,  if  before  Him  they  feel  uneasy 
and  ashamed,  let  us  rise  and  once  again 
open  the  door,  and  let  those  conflicting 
things  go  out  of  our  life,  as  indeed,  at 
that  moment,  they  wish  to  go  out. 

Now,  if  you  have  grasped  the  spirit  of 
my  words  so  far,  and  of  this  old  illustra- 
I  113 


If  God  be  for  Us 


tion,  I  can  pass  on  to  deal  briefly,  and  yet 
quite  fulfilling  my  intention,  with  the 
body  of  ideas  and  fancies  and  beliefs 
underlying  these  words  :  "  angels,  princi- 
palities, things  present,  things  to  come, 
powers."  In  these  words  it  is  evident 
that  St.  Paul  is  marshalling  before  his  own 
imagination  certain  aspects  and  shapes 
which,  apart  from  his  faith  in  the  love  of 
God  in  Christ,  would  dishearten  or  appal 
his  spirit.  What  were  those  formidable 
aspects  or  shapes  ? 

It  would  take  me  far  beyond  the  limits 
of  my  purpose  to  deal  even  inadequately 
with  that  view  of  God  and  the  world 
which  probably  lay  at  the  back  of  the 
minds  of  those  to  whom  the  Gospel  first 
was  preached.  I  should,  to  begin  with, 
be  under  obHgation  to  describe  the  rise 
of  the  spirit  of  speculation  amongst  the 
Jews,  dating  historically  from  the  time  of 
the  Exile.  I  do  not  mean  to  say  that  men, 
still  less  men  with  such  a  faculty  for 
religion  as  the  Jews,  never  concerned 
114 


If  God  be  for  Us 


themselves  with  abstract  questions  con- 
cerning God  and  the  soul  until  they  were 
taken  captive.  But  what  I  do  say  is  that 
the  captivity — in  the  judgment  of  the 
later  writers  and  editors  of  Holy  Scrip- 
ture— (witness  the  message  of  the  Book 
of  Jonah  and  the  burden  of  many  of  the 
Psalms),  had  the  effect  of  deepening 
human  life,  of  raising  questions  which 
pierced  deeper  and  deeper  until  they 
touched  the  very  frontier  where  the  human 
mind  must  pause.  This  is  an  effect 
which,  in  the  light  of  our  own  experience, 
we  are  prepared  for.  It  is  life  and  death, 
it  is  experience,  it  is  defeat,  it  is  over- 
throw, it  is  disappointment,  which  lays 
open  the  depths  within  us,  and  discovers 
the  depths  around  us. 

When  all  prospect  of  Israel  or  Judah 
ever  becoming  a  nation  again  was  re- 
moved, the  soul  of  the  people,  represented 
by  its  prophets  and  saints,  began  to  turn 
in  upon  itself.  Here  as  always  there  was 
first  that  which  was  natural  and  after- 
ward that  which  was  spiritual.  When 
115 


If  God  be  for  Us 


the  dream  of  being  a  great  nation,  the 
peer  of  Egypt  or  Assyria,  had  been 
shattered,  there  and  then  the  soul  of  this 
God-discipHned  people  fell  back  upon 
more  essential  things.  Good  men  per- 
ceived God's  will  and  stated  it  in  the 
exclamation  "  that  Zion  is  her  bulwark 
and  her  God  her  glory." 

But  before  this  solution  and  interpreta- 
tion of  her  long  experience  had  been 
perceived  and  accepted, — and  we  can 
trace  the  whole  story  in  the  Old  Testa- 
ment, in  some  of  the  more  rebellious 
Psalms,  in  the  Books  of  Chronicles,  in 
Ezekiel,  and  in  Haggai;  the  beautiful, 
pathetic  story  of  the  soul  of  a  people 
being  braced  by  God  to  forego  a  worldly 
ambition  and  to  accept  a  career  of  the 
Spirit ;  the  soul  of  a  people,  we  might  say, 
contending  like  our  Saviour  in  the  wilder- 
ness, tempted  of  the  devil,  and  later, 
dropping  sweat  and  blood  in  a  Gethsemane, 
learning  to  say,  "  Thy  will  be  done  "  ; — 
before  accepting  such  an  interpretation 
and  solution  of  her  long  experience,  there 
116 


If  God  be  for  Us 


was  many  a  bitter  cry  when  good  men 
wrestled  with  the  contradictions  of  life, 
with  the  baffling  triumph  of  the  great, 
godless  powers  of  the  world,  and  with  the 
apparent  silence  of  God.  But  at  last 
the  great  light  broke  upon  the  holiest 
souls, — that  God's  purpose  for  His  people 
was  not  and  had  never  been  that  they 
should  be  great,  having  chariots  and 
horsemen  like  the  uncircumcised  nations 
of  the  world,  but  that  they  should  be  holy 
unto  the  Lord. 

Now,  in  all  this  process  and  passage 
from  merely  natural  ambitions  to  the 
acceptance  of  a  mission  of  suffering  and 
testimony  to  God,  the  soul  in  man  had 
been  profoundly  intensified.  Baffled  of 
its  outlet  towards  the  world,  the  soul 
turned  in  upon  itself  and  discovered  an 
inlet  towards  God.  Faith  built  for  itself 
an  house  not  made  with  hands,  eternal 
in  the  heavens.  There  is  no  more  won- 
derful proof  of  God's  peculiar  intercourse 
with  the  soul  of  the  Jewish  people  than 
to  observe  how  they  faced  the  disaster  of 
117 


If  God  be  for  Us 


all  their  worldly  ambitions  and  became 
deep  enough  to  be  satisfied  with  an  over- 
throw at  the  hands  of  life  which  flung 
them  on  the  breast  of  God. 

When  a  puissant  nation  is  denied  its 
freedom,  when  it  sees  no  happy  issue  and 
occupation  for  its  natural  force,  you  will 
inevitably  have  psychology,  mere  think- 
ing in  a  circle  and  pessimism.  For  pessi- 
mism is  simply  insight  without  faith.  It 
is  tenderness  without  faith,  tenderness 
refining  upon  itself,  and  failing  to  com- 
plete itself  and  recover  from  itself  in 
some  hearty  activity. 

It  was  in  that  period,  doubtless,  when 
the  nation,  having  abandoned  its  merely 
worldly  ambitions,  was  falling  through 
space  towards  God — it  was  then,  we  may 
believe,  that  interest  in  the  unseen,  in 
what  might  lie  beyond  experience,  in 
theories  of  existence,  in  apocalyptic,  be- 
came a  necessity. 

It  may  be  said  that  the  Jews  picked 
up  their  apocalyptic  in  Babylon,  and  that 
in  order  to  understand  what  they  believed, 
118 


If  God  be  for  Us 


we  must  study  Babylonian  sources,  and 
beyond  them  the  behefs  and  supersti- 
tions of  still  remoter  ages.  I  do  not  think 
so.  Here  again  I  agree  with  Mr.  Chester- 
ton, that  to  understand  religion  to- 
day there  is  no  need  to  acquaint  oneself 
with  the  habits  of  the  undisturbed  South 
Sea  Islanders.  The  way  to  understand 
religion  is  to  go  to  church.  Nay,  I 
should  say  the  way  to  understand  religion 
is  to  have  had  any  one  of  those  shattering 
human  experiences,  the  loss  of  a  wife  or 
of  a  child,  or  the  prospect  of  a  surgical 
operation,  you  still  being  a  young  man 
with  the  world  before  you,  or  to  have 
found  yourself  out  in  some  moral  shame. 
These  are  among  the  things  which  quicken 
the  soul  to  search  for  God. 

Let  it  suffice  to  say  that  in  Apostolic 
times  there  was  abroad  in  the  world  a 
spiritualistic  philosophy  which  had  arisen 
doubtless  in  the  first  instance  in  all  finer 
souls  as  a  refuge  from  the  sense  of  futility 
and  despair,  a  philosophy  which,  to  begin 
with,  was  a  faith  and  even  something  of 
119 


If  God  be  for  Us 


a  gospel,  and  which,  Uke  every  other  faith, 
was  compelled  to  develop  itself  to  meet 
the  difficulties  from  the  side  of  the  human 
reason,  and  to  accommodate  itself  to 
established  pieties  and  prejudices.  The 
consequence  was  that  an  elaborate  gnosis 
or  interpretation  of  all  things  in  terms  of 
spirit,  of  demonic  or  angelic  influence, 
was  current  in  the  world,  and  was  indeed, 
in  one  aspect  of  it  or  another,  the  first 
enemy  of  the  Christian  faith. 

I  might  proceed  to  indicate  some  of  the 
outstanding  principles  of  this  spiritualistic 
philosophy.  But  I  shall  content  myself 
with  a  word  or  two.  Its  first  and  per- 
vasive principle  was  that  matter  is  evil. 
The  question  thereupon  arose.  How  did 
this  world  come  into  existence  ?  It  must 
have  proceeded  from  God.  But  how  could 
what  is  evil  proceed  from  Him  who  is 
pure  spirit  and  goodness  ?  To  overcome 
this  dilemma,  it  was  alleged  that  in  the 
immense  gap  between  pure  Spirit  or  God 
and  matter  or  creation,  there  is  an  im- 
measurable host  of  spirits  organised  and 
120 


If  God  be  for  Us 


graded,  becoming  lower  and  lower  in 
quality  as  you  proceed  from  God  to  the 
earth,  but  the  difference  of  spiritual  grade 
between  one  rank  and  another  is  extremely 
fine.  According  to  this  scheme,  it  was  not 
God  who  created  the  world  but  an  inferior 
Power,  the  Demiurge,  who  of  course  must 
have  been  in  some  relation  to  God,  but 
between  God  and  the  Demiurge  it  was 
felt  not  to  be  so  impious  to  suggest  a 
relation  as  it  would  have  been  to  bring 
God  into  direct  contact  with  the  finished 
product  of  creation.  The  Demiurge  in 
turn  established  and  sustained  his  agency 
over  things  by  means  of  hierarchies  or 
levels  of  spirits,  angels,  principalities, 
powers,  thrones,  and  so  on. 

It  was  a  naive  attempt  to  solve,  by  a 
system  which  one  might  picture  to  one's 
own  mind,  a  problem  for  which  perhaps 
there  is  no  solution  of  the  kind.  At  the 
outset  most  probably  these  intervening 
spirits  were  not  supposed  to  be  evil. 
They  were,  from  the  moral  point  of  view, 
indifferent  and  plastic:  and  in  the  New 
121 


If  God  be  for  Us 


Testament  the  line  which  is  taken  is  not 
that  they  are  necessarily  evil.  The  line 
in  the  New  Testament  is,  as  we  shall 
go  on  presently  to  say,  that  whatever 
they  are,  Christ  has  triumphed  over  them 
and  can  endue  the  soul  with  a  power 
which  sets  us  free  from  their  influence. 

It  was  inevitable,  however,  that  as  soon 
as  men  began  to  be  troubled  by  the  obvious 
evils  of  the  world,  these  should  be  traced 
to  the  operation  of  some  of  those  inter- 
vening ranks  of  spirits — to  the  imperfec- 
tion of  their  particular  work  in  the  organ- 
ised scheme  of  existence,  or  to  their  abuse 
of  the  freedom  which  had  been  measured 
out  to  them  by  their  superiors. 

Now  here  again  I  would  ask  you  to 
remember  that  it  was  always  a  serious 
thing  to  live.  However  defective  and 
impossible  of  belief  such  a  doctrine  may 
be  to  ourselves,  let  us  not  forget  that 
it  was  at  any  rate  a  protest  against  the 
despair  of  the  human  reason  face  to  face 
with  a  universe  whose  final  processes  are 
still  inscrutable.  The  questions  in  which 
122 


If  God  be  for  Us 


this  gnosticism  interested  itself  are  ques- 
tions which  lie  at  the  root  of  our  religious 
consciousness,  and  will  under  new  terms 
and  dialects  continually  recur.  "  The 
impulse  was  given  to  its  speculations  by 
an  overwhelming  sense  of  the  unapproach- 
able majesty  of  God,  by  an  instinctive 
recognition  of  the  chasm  which  separated 
God  from  man,  from  the  world,  from 
matter.  Its  energy  was  sustained  by 
the  intense  yearning  after  some  mediation 
which  might  bridge  over  this  chasm, 
might  establish  intercommunion  between 
the  finite  and  the  Infinite." 

Confronted  with  this  philosophy,  en- 
countering it  in  the  general  atmosphere, 
aware  of  its  principles  in  his  own  mind, 
how  does  the  Apostle  deal  with  it  in  this 
spontaneous  outpouring  ?  For  in  these 
glowing  words,  I  repeat,  we  are  not  deal- 
ing with  the  momentary  excitement  and 
sudden  enthusiasm  of  a  man,  but,  as  I 
believe,  with  deep,  reasoned  principles  of 
thought  and  of  belief  which  in  many  a 
lonely,  unrecorded  struggle,  perhaps  in 
123 


If  God  be  for  Us 


those  three  silent  years  in  Arabia,  Saul 
of  Tarsus  had  wrought  into  the  marrow 
of  his  soul.  There  is  heat  in  the  passage 
certainly,  but  the  heat  only  serves  to 
melt  the  last  restraint  and  reticence  of  his 
spirit,  permitting  us  to  see  the  inmost  and 
final  things  which  all  the  time  were  there. 
St.  Paul  does  not  argue  here  for  or 
against  those  theories.  They  may  be 
partially  true.  They  may  be  wholly 
false.  He  simply  falls  back  upon  what 
for  him  is  the  one  truth  and  fact.  God 
is  for  us,  Christ  being  witness.  God  is 
according  to  Christ.  Christ  is  the  nature 
of  God.  Everything  else  must  take  its 
place  or  keep  its  place  beneath  or  within 
that  final  and  all-penetrating  fact.  For 
it  is  an  all-penetrating  fact.  In  our 
language,  what  St.  Paul  means  at  least 
is  this  (and  may  not  this  be  the  all- 
embracing  truth  of  the  Doctrine  of  the 
Deity  of  Christ  to  which  the  Church 
has  clung,  with  sometimes  even  a  blind 
tenacity,  through  history,  even  consenting 
to  shed  rivers  of  blood  rather  than  add  an 
124 


If  God  be  for  Us 


iota  to  the  "  homoousion  "  ?) :  that  there 
is  one  order  of  mind  throughout  the 
universe,  that  the  Power  with  whom  we 
have  to  do  is  not  merely  Uke,  but  the  same 
as,  that  which  dwelt  in  Christ  Jesus  in 
bodily  form. 

In  short,  it  might  be  maintained  that 
the  innermost  contention  within  the  belief 
in  the  Incarnation  of  God  in  Christ  is 
that  life  is  sane.  If  God  is  for  us,  and  that 
is  equal  to  saying,  if  God  is  in  Christ, 
then  neither  angels  nor  principalities,  nor 
things  present  nor  things  to  come,  nor 
powers — ^nothing  in  that  immense  space 
which  our  minds  conceive  as  lying  between 
us  and  the  final  habitation  of  our  souls, 
no  intervening  substance  or  spirit,  can 
keep  us  apart  from  this  Immediacy  of 
Christ  with  us.  Everywhere,  anywhere. 
He  shall  be  with  us  so  long  as  our  Spirit 
maintains  its  unity  and  identity. 

And  so  it  happens  as  a  necessary  conse- 
quence   that    Christianity    soon    or    late 
makes  for  the  overthrow  of  all  supersti- 
tion, of  all  spiritualism,  of  every  tyranny 
125 


If  God  be  for  Us 


over  the  mind  of  man  in  the  name  of  the 
merely  gigantic  or  occult  or  weird.  For 
Christianity  declares,  and  rests  upon,  and 
recovers  itself  in,  the  faith  that  the  Content 
of  the  Eternal  Mind  is — ^goodness,  the 
simple,  real,  intelligible,  human  goodness 
which  we  see  in  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ. 
It  is  a  Face  like  His  Face  shall  receive 
us,  a  Hand  like  His  Hand  shall  throw 
open  the  gates  of  new  life  to  us. 

I  read  in  the  New  Testament  that  Christ 
"  spoiled  the  principalities  and  the  powers 
and  made  a  show  of  them  openly,  tri- 
umphing over  them  in  His  Cross."  I  do 
not  know  all  that  these  words  and  many 
others  like  them  may  mean.  I  can,  how- 
ever, feel  what  they  must  have  meant  to 
those  who  were  asked  at  the  beginning 
to  believe  them.  And  what  these  words 
and  those  many  others  which  have  the 
same  burden  would  mean  for  them — and 
it  is  what  they  mean  for  me — is  this  : 
that  surrounded  as  we  are  by  the  unknown, 
by  a  spiritual  order,  in  which,  it  may  be, 
the  ancient  evil  of  the  world  has  its 
126 


If  God  be  for  Us 


throne  and  complicated  system  of  govern- 
ment and  relations, — a  spiritual  head- 
quarters to  which  the  evil  influences  of 
lives  return  and  from  which,  it  may  be, 
they  descend  to  the  earth  again  to  vex 
and  seduce  the  ever-new  race  of  men  ; 
surrounded  by  such  a  world  of  possi- 
bilities (to  say  no  more),  we  believe  in  the 
reign  of  that  God  who  dwelt  in  all  fullness 
in  Christ  Jesus  ;  we  believe  that  He  is 
there  as  He  is  here,  that  no  spot  exists 
in  the  Universe  of  Spirit  which  is  given 
over  to  Chaos  or  to  undisturbed  and  un- 
threatened  devilry. 

"  I  am  persuaded  that  neither  .  .  . 
angels  nor  principalities,  nor  things  present 
nor  things  to  come,  nor  powers,  shall  be 
able  to  separate  us  from  the  love  of  God 
which  is  in  Christ  Jesus  our  Lord."  It 
is  as  though  St.  Paul  were  saying  :  You 
and  I  know  nothing  for  certain  about 
the  immaterial  world  which  one  day  shall 
receive  us.  I  may  have  my  own  beliefs, 
and  those  beliefs  of  mine  I  may  clothe 
with  such  imagery  and  circumstance  as 
127 


If  God  be  for  Us 


help  me  to  realise  them.  But  in  all  these 
things  it  may  be  that  I  err.  The  Lord 
has  not  spoken  plainly  concerning  such 
things  :  it  may  be  that  by  His  silence 
He  would  discourage  all  mere  curiosity 
concerning  the  unseen  world.  One  thing 
I  know  ;  God  is  supreme,  and  for  me  God 
is  Christ. 

Luther's  hymn,  indeed,  is  a  fair  transla- 
tion and  comment  on  the  passage  which 
has  been  engaging  us. 

"  A  safe  stronghold  our  God  is  still, 
A  trusty  shield  and  weapon  ; 

He'll  help  us  clear  from  all  the  ill 
That  hath  us  now  o'ertaken. 

The  ancient  prince  of  hell 

Hath  risen  with  purpose  fell ; 

Strong  mail  of  craft  and  power 

He  weareth  in  this  hour  ; 
On  earth  is  not  his  fellow. 

"  With  force  of  arms  we  nothing  can. 
Full  soon  were  we  down-ridden  ; 

But  for  us  fights  the  proper  Man 
Whom  God  Himself  hath  bidden. 

Ask  ye  who  is  this  same  ? 

Christ  Jesus  is  His  name. 

Of  Sabaoth  the  Lord, 

Sole  God  to  be  adored, 

'Tis  He  must  win  the  battle. 

128 


If  God  be  for  Us 


'  And  were  this  world  all  devils  o'er. 
And  watching  to  devour  us, 

We  lay  it  not  to  heart  so  sore  ; 
Not  they  can  overpower  us. 

And  let  the  prince  of  ill 

Look  grim  as  e'er  he  will. 

He  harms  us  not  a  whit  ; 

For  why  ?   his  doom  is  writ  ; 
A  word  shall  quickly  slay  him. 

*  God's  word,  for  all  their  craft  and  force. 
One  moment  will  not  linger. 

But,  spite  of  hell,  shall  have  its  course  ; 
'Tis  written  by  His  finger. 

And  though  they  take  our  life, 

Goods,  honour,  children,  wife. 

Yet  is  their  profit  small ; 

These  things  shall  vanish  all. 
The  city  of  God  remaineth." 


129 


Chapter   VI 


Nor  height,  nor  depth,  nor  any  other  creation. 


Chapter   VI 


In  the  work  of  the  poet  whom  best  I 
know,  to  whom,  under  God,  I  owe  more 
than  to  any  other  for  insight,  for  respect 
and  sympathy  for  the  human  soul,  for  a 
point  of  view  from  which  to  interpret 
experience  in  terms  of  God,  there  are 
four  hnes  which  never  fail  to  raise  in  my 
own  mind  the  very  spectre  which  con- 
fronted the  soul  of  St.  Paul  when  he  asked 
himself  this  question  :  "  Shall  the  height 
or  the  depth,  shall  the  utter  vastness  of 
things  separate  us  from  the  love  of  God 
which  is  in  Christ  Jesus  our  Lord  ?  " 

In  the  Epilogue  to  "  Ferishtah's  Fan- 
cies," Browning  has  left  us  some  twenty 
lines  which  will  always  have  for  some  souls 
the  power  of  a  "  Marseillaise." 

**  Thronging  through  the  cloud -rift,  whose  are  they,  the 
faces 
Faint  revealed  yet  sure  divined,  the  famous  ones 
of  old  ? 

133 


If  God  be  for  Us 


'  What,'  they  smile,  *  our  names,  our  deeds  so  soon 
erases 
Time  upon  his  tablet  where  Life's  glory  lies  en- 
rolled ? 

**  *  Was  it  for  mere  fool's-play,  make-beheve  and  mum- 
ming. 
So  we  battled  it  like  men,  not  boylike  sulked  or 
whined  ? 
Each  of  us  heard  clang  God's   **  Come  !  "  and  each 
was  coming. 
Soldiers  all,  to  forward  face,  not  sneaks  to  lag  be- 
hind I 

**  *  How  of  the  field's    fortune  ?    That  concerned    our 
Leader  ! 
Led,  we  struck  our  stroke  nor  cared  for  doings  left 
and  right ; 
Each  as  on  his  sole  head,  failer  or  succeeder. 

Lay  the  blame  or  lit  the  praise  :  no  care  for  cowards  : 
fight !  ' 

"Then  the  cloud-rift  broadens,  spanning  earth  that's 
under, 
Wide  our  world  displays  its  worth,  man's  strife  and 
strife's  success. 
All  the  good  and  beauty,  wonder  crowning  wonder. 
Till  my  heart  and  soul  applaud  perfection,  nothing 
less." 

And   now   listen   to   the   four   lines   in 

which,  as  it  seems  to  me,  a  man  might 

express  the  last,  the  final  despair.     They 

are  a  paraphrase,  I  believe,  and  exposi- 

134 


If  God  be  for  Us 


tion  of  that  mood  of  blankness  and  empti- 
ness, when  the  horrible  insinuation  of  our 
ultimate  futility,  the  laughter  and  con- 
tempt of  death,  offers  itself  to  us, — a 
mood  which  even  the  Great  Apostle  had 
known,  nay — ^why  should  not  we  say 
it  and  claim  it  with  great  wonder  and 
gratitude  ?  —  a  mood  which  our  Lord 
Jesus  knew  for  one  awful  moment  on 
the  Cross,  a  mood  which  He  triumphed 
over  on  that  battlefield  which  lies  some- 
where between  the  "  Elohi,  Elohi,  lama 
sabachthani  "  and  the  "  Father,  into  Thy 
hands  "  ;  the  last  awful  fear  that  things 
may  mean  nothing  at  the  end  and  there- 
fore may  have  intended  nothing  all  the 
time.     Listen  to  the  poet : 

**  Only,  at  heart's  utmost  joy  and  triumph,  terror 

Sudden  turns  the  blood  to  ice  :    a  chill  wind  dis- 
encharms 
All  the  late  enchantment !     What  if  all  be  error — 
If  the  halo  irised  round  my  head  were.  Love,  thint 
arms  ?  " 

*'  What  if  all  be  error  ?  "     A  man  who 

can  say  those  words  in  pain  is  standing 

or  has  stood  upon  the  last  promontory^ 

135 


If  God  be  for  Us 


overlooking   vast,    sad    waters.     Even  a 
great   man   had   better   stand  there  once 
only,    and     then,    but    for     an    instant. 
Ordinary  men  had  better  never  go  so  far. 
Fortunately,  ordinary  men  have  not  the 
faculty  for  such  loneliness,  for  such  separa- 
tion of  their  soul  from  their  body.     This 
is  the  experience,  I  venture  to  think,  which 
the   Hebrew    belief   had   in    view,    which 
declared  that  to  see  God  is  to  die.     The 
sense  of  the  Absolute  brings  Death.     We 
sometimes  in  our  folly  ask  for  an  open 
vision,  for  a  direct  immediate  contact  with 
reality.     We    know    not    what    we    ask. 
Thanks  be  to  God  who  hideth  Himself, 
who  discloseth  Himself  to  us,  here  a  little 
and  there  a  little,  and  all  within  the  aspect 
of   His   Grace   in   Christ — ^lest   the   truth 
should  at  any  moment  be  too  much  for  us. 
I  have  written  elsewhere  of  this  sense 
of  vastness  and  its  natural  effects  upon 
faith  ;    how,   unless  we  take  care,   there 
may  come  a  kind  of  giddiness  over  us, 
occupying  such  a  precarious  place  between 
such  a  depth  and  such  a  height.     It  is 
136 


If  God  be  for  Us 


this  sense  of  vastness  which  makes  for 
the  pathos  of  Tennyson,  and  for  the  dignity 
and  pride  and  aggrievedness  of  Arnold, 
and  for  the  cynicism  and  pitifulness  of 
Hardy,  and  for  the  frivolity  and  sensuality 
of  smaller  irresponsible  writers.  These 
are  the  various  consequences  which  are 
inevitable,  and  they  threaten  us  all 
peculiarly  in  these  days  when  we  have 
become  aware,  as  no  age  ever  could  be 
aware,  of  the  intolerable  duration  of  time, 
and  the  aching  immensity  of  space. 

I  cannot  but  believe  that  it  was  essen- 
tially this  very  challenge  which  St.  Paul 
is  facing  here  :  "  Shall  the  height  or  the 
depth  separate  us  from  the  love  of  God  ?  " 
Of  course  the  ideas  which  those  words 
called  up  for  him  would  be  other  than  they 
suggest  to  us.  But  beneath  the  surface 
here  also  is  a  man  facing  the  universe, 
overcoming  the  terror  and  discourage- 
ment of  it  by  the  power  of  his  faith  in 
Christ. 

When  all  is  said,  there  is  no  other  way. 
"  We  have  but  faith,  we  cannot  know." 
137 


If  God  be  for  Us 


"  This  is  the  victory  which  overcometh 
the  world,  even  our  faith."  "  By  faith 
we  know  that  the  world  was  made  by 
God."  "  Faith  is  the  giving  substance 
to  things  hoped  for,  a  conviction  con- 
cerning things  not  seen."  "  Let  not  your 
heart  be  troubled,"  so  our  Lord  besought 
us,  "  believe." 

Faith  is  a  venture  upon  God  which  we 
make  on  the  invitation  of  Jesus  ;  and  the 
peace  of  God,  the  total  sense  of  well- 
being,  which  comes  to  us  in  consequence, 
we  hold  to  be  sufficient  verification.  From 
this  point  of  view,  the  thing  that  makes  a 
man  a  Christian  is  that  he  has  staked,  not 
this  or  that,  but  himself  (the  very  phrase 
used  by  St.  Paul  of  Epaphroditus) — ^he 
has  staked  himself  upon  Christ.  A  man 
is  a  Christian — from  the  point  of  view  of 
this  region  of  things  with  which  we  are 
dealing  now, — who  can  say  :  I  am  in  for 
Christ.  I  believe  in  Christ.  I  believe 
in  Christ's  belief.  I  see  the  things  which 
seem  hostile,  but  Christ  saw  them  with  a 
clearer  eye  than  mine.  He  saw  the  stars, 
138 


If  God  be  for  Us 


but  they  did  not  make  Him  shudder  with 
fear.  They  did  not  move  Him  to  any 
mere  pity  for  man, — having  such  thoughts 
of  Himself  and  so  soon  to  be  engulfed  in 
the  ocean  of  eternity.  Beneath  the  stars, 
in  desert  places.  He  knelt,  yielding  Him- 
self up  to  God,  thinking  Himself  into  God. 
He  met,  He  encountered.  He  transformed 
the  Ancient  Silence  by  His  moral  Passion 
and  Insight.  He  thereby  saved  my  in- 
tellectual soul,  as  in  His  Patience  of  Love 
on  Calvary  He  saved  my  moral  soul. 
And  what  makes  me  a  Christian  is  that  I 
believe  all  that  of  Him  and  love  Him  for 
all  that. 

The  question  whether  ultimately  I  am 
right  or  wrong  is  not,  properly  speaking, 
open  to  me.  What  makes  me  a  Christian, 
once  again,  is  that  here  also,  in  the  words 
of  a  hymn  of  my  childhood,  "  I  want  to 
be  like  Jesus."  Jesus  called  the  Power 
behind  all  things  —  Father.  The  stars 
moved  across  the  heavens  for  Him,  the 
night-wind  sighed  :  He  was  at  home  with 
God.  The  clouds  massed  over  His  head 
139 


If  God  be  for  Us 


from  the  sixth  hour  to  the  ninth  hour. 
He  tasted  the  bitterness  of  Hfe,  He  tasted 
the  bitterness  of  death.  For  one  instant 
His  Soul  seemed  to  hover  in  the  balance. 
"  My  God,  my  God,"  He  cried,  "  where 
art  Thou  ?  "  But  next  moment  the  deep, 
deep  peace  was  come  again.  And  Jesus 
whispered,  "  Father,  into  Thy  hands." 

And  once  again,  what  makes  me  Chris- 
tian is  the  faith  which  is  at  the  same  time 
a  necessity  for  my  very  sanity  as  a  man — 
that  Christ's  experience  of  God  is  the 
final  truth  of  things. 

Who  shall  separate  us  from  the  love  of 
God  ?  Shall  tribulation,  or  distress,  or 
persecution,  or  famine,  or  nakedness,  or 
peril,  or  sword  ? 

Nay,  in  all  these  things  we  are  more  than 
conquerors  through  Him  that  loved  us. 
For  I  am  persuaded — (I  am  persuaded, — 
I  am  in  the  condition  now  of  one  who  has 
been  persuaded,  not  overborne  by  an 
argument,  but  moved,  melted,  won  by  the 
gentle,  loving  pressure  of  another  upon 
140 


If  God  be  for  Us 


me) — I  am  persuaded  that  neither  death 
nor  Hfe,  nor  angels,  nor  principaHties, 
nor  things  present,  nor  things  to  come, 
nor  powers,  nor  height,  nor  depth,  nor  any 
other  creature  shall  be  able  to  separate 
us  from  the  love  of  God  which  is  in  Christ 
Jesus,  our  Lord. 


Primed  by  Hazell,  Watson  &  Viney,  Ld.,  London  and  Aylesbury,  England, 


Date...Due 

.'■> 

- 

AM  f 

fi 

r   1 

^ 

r 

* 


